Dollar Dreadfuls Horror and Ghost Stories A Prequel ... - Smashwords

Dollar Dreadfuls Horror and Ghost Stories A Prequel Chris Roberts

Dollar Dreadfuls : Horror and Ghost Stories A Prequel F and M Publications, 25 Torrens Court Denmark Hill London SE5 8HJ www.fandmpublications.co.uk Copyright © Chris Roberts, 2012 Smashwords Edition Smashwords License Statement This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. ISBN: 9780957213432

Contents Introduction Penny Dreadfuls ancient and modern Assembling folklore and collecting tales In the beginning was the idea of a city Underground and darkness Rivers and other sacred places Tired of life? London’s dead and what to do with them Ye olde ghost story Strange beasts and lost zoos Walk the streets the stories came from Self Guided Walks Reviews

Introduction London is a mortropolis as Carl the sometime narrator, part time hero of the early Dollar Dreadfuls proclaims. People have been dying and buried there for millennia and for almost as long other people have been telling stories about them coming back. We associate the London ghost story with the nineteenth century and Charles Dickens but many tales pre date him and London has been collecting folklore, as well as generating its own, for a very long time. As migrants flocked there from all over the world people brought their own folktales with them where they found a new home in the city by the Thames, or even in the river itself. In 2011 I was involved in a theatre piece called the Taniwha Thames. The Taniwha being a creature of Maori legend which to some is a selkie like being whilst others view it as an embodiment of the spirit of the river or stretch of coast it was found in. The Taniwha is a trickster but also capable of helping humans. According to legend one was spotted by Captain Cook’s men on the return journey to London. The idea behind Taniwha Thames is that it followed the ships all the way to Deptford and has been living in the river ever since speaking to all Londoners but most especially those with cultural or blood ties to New Zealand. There is native London lore of which the stand out example is Queen Rat. It was she that gave the hard back originals of the Dollar Dreadfuls their name. Queen Rat or Queenie is a giant rodent who lives in the covered rivers and sewers of London. According to the 19th century sewer scavengers, the toshers, she would watch over them whilst they worked and if she took a fancy to one of their number follow him out of the sewer. Once she left the realm below she transformed into a raven haired beauty and would pursue the object of her desire. If the chap in question satisfied ratty, and didn’t talk about the incident, he would have tremendous good fortune. Some stories suggest that all the other rats in the sewers would help him out and that he would be immune from death by drowning. All agree however that after his encounter he would amass a great fortune and have a huge family the first of whom would be a daughter. Here versions of the story diverge. In the classic version the child has one eye grey and the other blue but some watermen (the legend was known to dockers, mudlarks, shipbuilders and ships’ crews) claim that the child has two grey eyes and is blind. Their belief is that the child would otherwise see the city as Queen Rat did and that the vision would drive her insane. Then there is the nature of the city itself, a cunning being that adapts over the centuries but still retains a particular character of its own. It was for this reason that the original team of writers, designers, photographers and illustrators thought that it would be more interesting to reset the legends and ghost stories of London in the modern era rather than just retell them in situ because if monsters are real and they existed once why should they not still be with us lurking just behind the ticket barrier or in the shadowy enclaves under the Thames crossings or, perhaps, reflected in the eyes of the beauty on the escalator.

So there arose a gathering of fresh little monsters, old tales in modern garb flitting across the city. These stories from another London set out to explore the dark spots of the modern metropolis. One Eye Grey was a collaborative effort bringing together people who fancied creating something chilling and pocket sized to read on the way to work, downloaded or hard copies purchased from the website (www.fandmpublications.co.uk). Their original paper form touted itself as a 21st century Penny Dreadful in a deliberate nod to the Victorian penny bloods that had first championed Spring Heeled Jack and the Peckham Ghost and a whole phantasmagoria of dark creatures. What this prequel hopes to do is to inspire you to go on and read the series. It also hopes to create a background and relay some of the original tales that inspired the collection alongside some other strange legends and trivia of Londinium. View what follows as something of a snapshot to give you an idea of the waters you’ll be swimming in and the creatures that’ll join you in the rest of the Dollar Dreadful series. Chris Roberts June 2012

Penny Dreadfuls ancient and modern Penny Dreadful or Penny Blood was initially a term applied to nineteenth century fiction magazines, in particular shocking serial stories with each section costing a penny, over time though the phrase came to mean any down market gaudy fiction publication. The 21st century Penny Dreadfuls sold for £2.50 in order to cover the inflated cost of delivery urchins but followed the format, The Penny Dreadfuls were printed on poor quality paper and aimed primarily at the expanding urban working classes from the 1830s onwards. Some were reprints or reworking of classic tales whilst others introduced fresh characters such as Varney the Vampire and the London folk demon Spring Heeled Jack. In an interestingly modern twist Jack shifted from being a villain in the early texts to a hero of the people in later ones. By the 1850s they had a huge readership. Such publications were viewed with dismay by the moral authorities of Victorian England. They were happy that the dreadfuls encouraged literacy but appalled by their content. In the 1890s, Alfred Harmsworth, reacted to this perceived corrupting influence by issuing new story papers for a half-penny. He started out with high-minded tales but these soon went downmarket prompting A.A. Milne to wryly comment that; 'Harmsworth killed the penny dreadful by the simple process of producing the ha'penny dreadfuller.' One character associated with the publications and their London focus is Spring Heeled Jack. Jack emerges from the shadows of early Victorian London to scare people in Limehouse, Kennington and Southwark. His favourite trick was a variation of knock and run except Jack not only ran but also leapt tall walls and scaled buildings making him incredibly hard to catch. He is described as being made of rubber and metal and having the ability, if the occasion demanded, of breathing fire. It has been suggested that Jack was perhaps a circus performer gone bad, much in the mould of 20th century comic villains. Another theory points out that Jack appeared just at the time of London’s greatest expansion – William Blake wrote the poem London to describe the processwhen not only were traditional rural parts being urbanised but also thousands of migrants were sucked in from the countryside. According to this theory Jack is a manifestation of the ills of urbanisation drawing on traditional countryside myths of the devil walking abroad. He was, if you like, an industrial version of the earlier free range organic demons of folklore. Over time more 'wholesome' comics such as Union Jack and upright characters such as Sexton Blake won out and these bled directly into the better known comics of the 20th century. Sexton Blake was one of a few very popular personalities to come out of the Dreadfuls appearing in thousands of adventures right up into the 1970s. Another figure, Jack Harkaway, was very popular in America. A good deal of the traffic was the other way though with American dime novels edited and rewritten for an English audience. This Americanisation was something that George Orwell bemoaned in his essay the Decline of English murder. However if he had looked

closer into 19th century English publications he would have found moral depravity was not something that the British needed to import. Some writers did have moral points to make particularly about disparities of wealth and poverty, whilst others enjoyed exposing vice amongst the upper classes, in a sense the roles that Oxfam, Hello Magazine and Pop Bitch provide today. Many pennys though left little to the readers' imagination, presenting them with incestuous slums and pox ridden hells. In these, to quote from the splendid History of Comics; 'Pigs ate the bodies of newly dead babes and hardened undertakers' men fainted at the sights which met their eyes. Hump backed dwarfs, harridans and grave robbers groped past against a background of workhouses, gaols, execution yards, thieves' kitchens and cemeteries.' Modern London lacks some of the above but the city is a still palette on which the stories are painted. From the opening description of crossing Vauxhall Bridge on a Monday morning leaving behind the hedonism of SW8’s nightclubs still throbbing into the working week the tales are set in contemporary London often involving real people and places. The journey into the West End is scattered with references to extinct cafes and bars culminating at the Dive Bar (AKA Kings Arms) late of Gerrard Street. It is currently (and has been for several years) a Chinese Restaurant but for a half century before that it was one of the most interesting public houses in London. Over two floors (ground and underground) it welcomed visitors, the local Chinese community and an odd combination of the fashionable young, older gay and established professional. It was comfortable for everyone and second home to many. During the last weekend of opening when literally the bar was drunk dry, people travelled back to London from across the globe, people laughed over shared reminiscences yet occasionally one’s glance might direct itself towards a person in a corner crying their eyes out whilst reliving a drama from the Dive Bar’s past. For me it was the first place I heard Polari (the secret gay language of London), and where I argued with a girlfriend about visiting rights (to the pub) when we broke up. I think she got Wednesday, Thursday and alternate Fridays. Sundays were neutral. On a Monday night in winter it was certainly as good a place as any for a group of friends to meet up in and discuss a funeral, reveal intimacies and gossip of their London lives and knowledge. Generally though they swap information and gossip about their absent friends some of whom appear to have met with very sticky ends at the hands, beaks, claws or teeth of a startling array of legendary creatures or, at least, have had a brush with something that makes them look over their shoulder on a regular basis. Other stories stretch out across the city from Shoreditch to Notting Hill to Camden, Bloomsbury and Brixton. They even move beyond London’s orbital motorway to the coastal towns that Londoners frequent on their holidays, leaving little traces of London and rather larger traces of strangeness in each. What holds many of the stories together

is the character of Carl. Sometime narrator of the first collection, he crops up at the end of the second and resumes his central role in the third. Several of the characters are also real because when the hard copy was being produced people could pay to have themselves written in. We saw it as a unique, and carbon neutral, gift opportunity particularly when it came to people placement as, for a consideration, we wrote people into the stories. This was done on a sliding scale from a glancing mention in the text by an established character along the lines of, 'Sorry I'm late but I was at Betty and Joe’s wedding anniversary last night in Walworth’. Beyond that it was possible to have oneself introduced as a character in the story including a brief description and a few lines of dialogue. All the characters in the (wedding focused) story Erasebook are real with the details provided by one of the bridesmaids as a wedding present. Mention of Walworth brings us neatly back to Carl, though before returning to him I need to say a few things about London SE17. It is unquestionably the most maligned and little known bit of central London that in a 100 year period, from roughly 1850 to 1950, lost a zoo, a station, a canal and a lake yet produced three incredible individuals in Charlie Chaplin comedian), Charles Babbage (father of computing) and Michael Faraday (electrical pioneer). It is my favourite London area despite having little to recommend it at first glance and no immediately obvious great architecture. It is doubtful however that anyone reading this has not seen Walworth (or some bits of it) at the cinema as so many films in the past five years have used its grubby estates and battered alleys as backdrop. The King’s Speech used one of these (the Pullens) where for years Carl and I officially lived in the same small flat, even though I never, in reality, knew him. That sentence probably needs explaining. I needed somewhere to live; Carl was off travelling so I was supposed to look after his flat for maybe six months. Two years on I did some research and started to try and track him down to no avail. Four years on I thought it time to change the name on the utility bills but the phone company insisted on speaking to Carl. When I pointed out that Carl was by this time probably dead (I’d heard back from friends of his) I was told he should contact the Southampton Branch where presumably they speak to dead people. I never did change the phone bill in the remaining six years and so Carl lived on via the phone book and the tenancy agreement. This was about the time that the idea for a collection of stories that became One Eye Grey and subsequently the Dollar Dreadfuls was floating around. I needed a name from a narrator that is present, yet absent, who exists on the cusp of reality, there could only have been one choice.

Folklore it’s assembling and dissembling To a certain extent we are all collectors and distributors of folklore whenever we pass on an urban legend, observe a superstation or use particular words or phrases; however accurately or otherwise we have remembered it. Certainly if we teach our children old playground games, enjoy regional cooking or (less probable) traditional dance we are helping to keep alive a folk tradition. Since 1878 the Folklore Society has been in a rather more structural fashion collecting, analyzing and interpreting traditional culture in all its forms through shared, language, dance and dress. The whole matter was slightly complicated, particularly in relation to dress, by the wholesale creation of traditions such as the kilt (OR WELSH COSTUME) which turns out to have been invented in 1727 by an Englishman Thomas Rawlinson. Another major problem was the thorough mangling which folktales in particular had undergone through the centuries in Europe. Many of Shakespeare’s plays for example were based on well-known stories not all of which were English, or occasionally were English and reset for dramatic purposes in another country. The plays are also full of references to popular beliefs about everything from witches to medicine. Some popular “English” nursery rhymes have overseas roots and perhaps most surprising of all the collected Grimm fairy stories which are popularly assumed to be north European turn out to be of French origin. The point is that investigating folklore is not always as obvious as it seems. This is even truer in a large, well connected trading city like London with its transient population and talent for assimilation. Easier, of course, if one restricts oneself to the past but culture is organic and vibrant as illustrator Arthur Rackham noted in a talk in 1919 where he said: “We do not think of London as a country for folklore, and yet London is a very large country with folklore.” The speaker Arthur Rackham was introducing that night, Edward Lovett, believed that Edwardian London was a repository of practices and beliefs more commonly associated with England’s rural past. He was a city of London banker who roamed poor parts of London such as Walworth talking to residents and observing what was sold in the local shops and apothecaries. He started to buy charms and other objects thought to be lucky or protective as well as taking extensive notes on the beliefs and practices of London’s poor from their actions to their sense of interior design. The latter including a weakness for acorn-shaped pulls for window blinds to protect houses from lightning. The vast array of objects he assembled is now broken up between the Pitt Rivers in Oxford and the Cuming and Science museums in London as well as the Wellcome Collection. Many of Lovett’s studies were of people from outside the capital who had made their home in it and brought their belief systems with them. He cites a cow keeper, originally from Devonshire, who believed that his cattle were cursed. His response was to take one of their hearts and stuck it all over with pins and nails in the belief that the pain inserted into the heart would trace itself back – and cause distress to - the person who placed the curse. London of course is (temporary) base to thousands of the most superstitious men of all, sailors, who provided him with a wealth of tales. Away from the

river and in all parts of the capital shops sold coloured beads to ward off sickness and soldiers returning from the front brought all manner of totems with them. Lovett’s approach to folklore can be summed up by the quote: “I not only have no theory, but as regards my personal opinion as to the reason why these remarkable beliefs in magic still exist in modern London, I simply say ‘I don’t know’“. Harry Price was a near contemporary of Lovett and also had a keen interest in collecting magic objects, though his slant was more towards the supernatural and he became famous for both reinstituting the Ghost Club and also for exposing fraudulent mediums. Price’s collection of objects and books were bequeathed to the University of London Library in Senate House, Bloomsbury, on his death in 1948. Bloomsbury is also home to the British Museum, a number of magical societies, several occult bookshops and a large number of writers and artists all of which play a role in dissemination of folklore and none more so than the little known but hugely influential writer Arthur Machen who died a year before Price in 1947. Stephen King has described the novella "The Great God Pan" as "Maybe the best [horror story] in the English language". Machen was mystic, who joined the occult Order of the Golden Dawn and is quoted as saying that “he who cannot see splendour in Grays Inn Road is unlikely to find it anywhere”. His fusion of folkloric and supernatural focused fiction is not only the template taken up by horror writers but his observations of London life make him a cult hero to many of today’s London writers and historians. The fusion of folk belief, magic and architecture found in London has been a popular theme since the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s London biography which gave a spur to organisations like the South East London Folklore Society and others keen to pull out more that is mystical about the city. They are joined by hundreds of bloggers, tour guides, researchers and academics all feeding an obsessive interest in the folkways and particular beliefs of the people in the city by the Thames. Essentially they are all telling tales, all relating bits of folklore, all digging at a rich seam of popular history going back millennia and all trying to come to terms with new information, fresh arrivals and modern takes on London. This is the realm of the modern folklorist; it is also the area we tried to reach with the collection of stories.

In the beginning there was the idea of the city The Roman London was simply a trading post on a tidal river at the outpost of the empire. The militarily minded the Romans used two of London’s other rivers (the Fleet and Walbrook) as defensive features and also the raised ground of Ludhill and Cornhill. This left only the north to protect and for most of the hundreds of years of its existence the Roman city did rather well. There was that incident with Boudicca who put the entire place to the torch (precursor of great fire and Blitz) but London became a large Romanised city and later the Normans in the eleventh century re-established London as the capital. A certain disinterest in London’s pre (and immediate post) Roman history is pointed out rather succinctly by Rudyard Kipling in his poem what the river knew part of which runs.... "I remember the bat-winged lizard-birds, The Age of Ice and the mammoth herds, And the giant tigers that stalked them down Through Regent's Park into Camden Town. And I remember like yesterday The earliest Cockney who came my way, When he pushed through the forest that lined the Strand, With paint on his face and a club in his hand. He was death to feather and fin and fur. He trapped my beavers at Westminster. He netted my salmon, he hunted my deer, He killed my heron off Lambeth Pier. And the Roman left and the Danes blew in-And that's where your history-books begin!" London at the time of the Danish, Saxon and later Norman conquests was not in the first rank of European settlements. It lacked the grandeur and history of Rome or Constantinople, the size of Paris or the wealth of either the Italian mercantile or North Sea and Baltic city states. It was not even capital of England for some of that period, still less Britain, and certainly nothing like the global metropolis is came to be from the 18th century onwards. That is not to say it lacked beautiful buildings or wealth and power just rather that it jostled with other places for status. Perhaps it is for this reason that it needed a good story to bolster its self esteem and just as in the 19th century London architects took the symbolism from the Roman Empire so earlier in its history London borrowed from classical legend. At the heart of the old city of London is the Guildhall which serves as both ceremonial and administrative centre. Some would have you believe that it is the site of the palace of the city’s alleged founder Brutus, a gentleman was descended from a refugee who fled Troy after its destruction by the Greeks. Brutus set up his new city after overcoming

the guardian giants of area Gog and Magog who, after Brutus subjugated them, still serve to protect the city and, in effigy, form part of the Lord Mayor’s Parade every year. That digression into historical fancy (albeit thousand year old historical fancy) is to give an idea just how seriously London takes itself and just what a broad swath of mystical tradition are entwined in its roots. For brevity’s sake these are only the essentials but it is worth mentioning that in some versions Gog and Magog are killed but the upshot is a city with Guildhall at its heart and a Temple to Diana which is now St Pauls Cathedral. Point is this is a place with a sense of destiny as well as spirituality. The founded by refugees of Troy is the sort of story poor orphans invent about their real parents to make themselves feel better. Even when the city was in its pomp in the 19th century London’s civic authorities borrowed the symbolism of Rome to bolster its status from the bearded representations of Old Father Tiber (reinvented as Old Father Thames) and the so called “Sturgeons’ Lampstands” on the Embankments which are actually based on Roman representations of entwined Dolphins. They also assumed the idea of The City –as opposed to just the city- when referring to the old City of London just as the inhabitants of Constantinople referred to their home as In The City, or Istanbul as it is in Turkish. This notion of a city within a larger entity is not entirely a conceit as until 1750 London meant the area of the old walled settlement from roughly Liverpool Street Station in the East, South to the Thames and West to near the River Fleet at Blackfriars. There it joined the city of Westminster (itself comprising most of the old Saxon settlement of Loudenweg) whilst over the water was the South work or Southwark, also known as the Ward Without the City. The rapid growth in the following century as bridges over the river filled in the gaps along the Thames and railways connected formerly outlying villages to the centre soon there was a continuous London stretching from Greenwich to Hammersmith. This London County Council was expanded in the 1960s as far out as Twickenham and Erith. The broader area of London is administered by the Greater London Authority but a large number of powers are held by the relatively tiny City of London within it and still visible near the heart of that city is the London Stone. The London Stone currently behind an iron grille on Cannon Street. All kinds of theories surround the stone, that it was a Druidic alter, Roman milestone or centre of the old roman city. Many historians also suggest that it was once much larger than its current 21 x 17 x 12 inches. The stones is a block of oolitic limestone which is naturally occurring in Kent not London and has been known as the stone of Brutus and also the one King Arthur drew the sword Excalibur out of. Alternatively it could be a section of the foundation of former mayor Henry Fitz-Ailwin's stone house which remained after the rest of the house was gone. Whatever its origins the stone acquired a mystical and symbolic authority as the place where oaths were sworn and proclamations made. There is also a myth that if the stone is moved from London the city itself will crumble.

Underground and darkness Over the centuries Londoners have built up subterranean legends. Many focus on the underground rail network, a fair number of others on the buried water courses such as the Walbrook and others on the countless cellars, buried passages and lost tunnels. In 1954 on Walbrook a temple dedicated to the Mithras, whose rites included secret ordeals in a dark underground place, was rediscovered. The remains of the Mithream can still to see in Temple Court though there are plans to move it to the original site, though there are none to recreate the rituals of Mithras underneath it. Areas to the north of the river Fleet were until relatively recently farmland and the story goes that in the early 19th century a herd of pigs were swept away in a flood down towards the Thames. They regained their composure, if pigs have composure, some point before reaching the larger river and attempted to swim back up stream to where they were from. Unfortunately they could never make it all the way and grew accustomed to foraging underground in and adjacent to the river so that eventually they settled down and began to breed. The result is the herds of albino feral swine rumoured to roam the Fleet tunnels. A similar tale is the basis for the film Raw Meat (AKA Death Line) in which human survivors of a 19th Century tunnel collapse are found to have been breeding underground and feeding off the occasional late night commuter. The language of the tribe had devolved over the years so it consisted entirely of phrases used by underground announcers such as “mind the gap” and “beware of the closing doors”. There are stories of giants along the Vauxhall to Stockwell stretch of the Victoria Line, ghostly footsteps at the Elephant and Castle and a screaming mummy at the (now abandoned) British Museum stop. In the modern era tales abound of figures either appearing on CCTV when no one is present or conversely not showing up in the mirrors or cameras when they manifestly are in plain sight. There should be sympathy too for a manager between Kennington and Oval who bantered with a works crew about their out of date equipment for ten minutes underground before a short while later finding the real works crew he was meant to be checking on in an entirely different spot. There are ghost lines that link closed stations or abandoned spars across the city and below the tube lines at Hungerford and Blackfriars are two deep tunnels built by the Post Office for their own rail network to transport mail across London. These are now part of the defence network of deep level shelters in central and suburban London. One of these played an unusual and highly significant part in the whole make-up of the post war city. Joined to Clapham South tube (under the Common) in South London is a bomb shelter and a small hospital used during the war. In the aftermath of the conflict the same shelter was used to temporarily house recently arrived migrants from the Caribbean. As non British citizens they had to register at the nearest Labour Exchange for work which happened to be in nearby Brixton where many subsequently settled transforming the area into what was once described as the capital of black Europe.

Most of the tunnels run under the city but several go beneath the Thames attempting to stitch London together that way. In 1850 about a third of London’s population lived east of London Bridge but the Thames there was a working dock area and bridges presented an obstacle, so other solutions were adopted. The Metropolitan Board of Works introduced the free Woolwich ferry in the 1880s but before that several tunnels had been dug. In 1798 Ralph Dodd tried to build one under the Thames between Gravesend and Tilbury, but this was halted when he ran into quicksand and out of finance. In 1808 Robert Vazie and Richard Trevithick got within forty metres of Limehouse shore when the Thames broke through. They cleared the workings, but when the same thing happened again the project was abandoned. In 1843 Isambard Kingdom Brunel completed the tunnel (between Rotherhithe and Wapping) started by his father, Marc Brunel, in 1825. In 1869 the Brunel’s’ 400-metre passage was taken over by the East London Railway and today the East London Line runs through it. A year later James Henry Greathead opened a new tunnel from Tower Hill to Vine Street which initially had a cable car service but was soon converted into a foot tunnel that attracted a million customers a year before closing in 1894. It has since been used for water mains. There are currently twenty tunnels under the Thames downriver of Hammersmith: two are foot passages at Greenwich and Woolwich, while the rest act as conduits for water, electricity, gas, cars and trains. For long stretches over many centuries, even before the industrial revolution, Londoners didn’t have to go underground for murk and darkness, all they had to do was step outside their front door. Some were attracted by this absence of light such as the artist Monet who spoke of the sun suspended in the air over the bridges being ‘no stronger than the still light of a lamp’. This was fine for him and the other French artists like Mallamé who said: ‘Shrouded in mist, it is an incomparable city.’ They flocked to London for the (lack of) light whilst four hundred years earlier William Shakespeare, who lived in Ireland Yard near the river Fleet, wrote ‘fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air’. Terrible London fogs are possibly what he had in mind and the description certainly fits. As the south-east’s forests shrank in the twelfth century, large deposits of sea-coal from the north-east coast provided the cheapest alternative to wood. This coal does not burn efficiently and a good deal of its energy is spent making smoke, not heat. A Londoner coined the term ‘smog’ in 1905 to describe the city’s insidious combination of natural fog and coal smoke, which is also known as a ‘pea-souper’ or ‘London particular’ and is the reason some British people still refer to London as ‘the (big) smoke’. By the 1800s, more than a million London residents were burning soft-coal, and winter ‘fogs’ became more than a nuisance. In 1879–80 a particular lasted from November to March and in 1952 a four-day fog officially killed 4000 Londoners, though a later study claims the actual total was 12,000: the majority of those who died did so from respiratory illnesses, though a significant number lost their lives falling off bridges or into unseen traffic. Things were so bad that the blind helped the sighted through the streets and in 1956 Parliament passed the Clean Air Act to reduce the burning of coal. The fogs

coated everything in the city with grime and many buildings blackened by the soot were only restored to their intended colours in the late twentieth century.

Rivers and other sacred places When the Thames was dredged there in 1857 it turned up the ceremonial Battersea shield dating from 300 BC and in the 1860s an Iron Age helmet was found at Waterloo Bridge. It is the only such helmet to have ever been found in southern England, and it is the only one with horns ever to have been found in Europe. In the 1990s Two Bronze Age spearheads were found alongside the remains of the wooden structure leading out into the Thames at Vauxhall. The way they had been driven deep into the foreshore suggested they had been placed there deliberately as a ritual offering, rather than simply lost or abandoned in battle. This site may have chosen because it is actually the confluence of three rivers (the Tyburn joins the Thames from the north and the Effra from the south). The Roman city of Londinium was established in the first century AD around the high ground of Cornhill and Ludgate Hill above the marshy flood plain to the north of the Thames. These high points were, and still are, used for religious observances. The White Tower of the Tower of London is built on a sacred hill and Primrose Hill is still where Druids mark the longest and shortest days. Greenwich has associations with the Norse goddess of sexuality Holda whilst Ludgate on Ludhill is named after the legendary King Lud. The first Roman Bridge was a temporary military one replaced in about 120 AD by a sturdier structure, at a site which held for much of the following 2000 years the only bridge in London. The Romans’ choice of crossing place would have been based on the narrowness of the channel, the firmness of the ground on both sides of the water and the fact that the river was still tidal at this point, thus permitting easy, speedy access to and from the sea. The bridge also allowed the rapid deployment of legionnaires to the south and provided a good defensive feature for the city. The river and bridge are essential to London and both were the focus of worship in Roman and, in the case of the Thames, pre Roman times. There are also numerous holy wells whose names now live on in areas like Clerkenwell or Camberwell. Water was seen as having healing and transformative powers whilst bridges are liminal places, full of hope and fear, the sites of sacrifice, suicide and supplication. What is perhaps surprising is that London’s waterfront is still a focus for religious observance in the 21st Century. When the Metropolitan Police investigating the Muti sacrifice of a small boy found at Tower Bridge in 2000 were told to search for evidence of other similar rituals they found more than a dozen sites along the tidal Thames. It quickly became apparent that whilst none of the other locations had led to quite such a grisly outcome they were nevertheless shocked at the active use of the river by voodoo adepts. More conventional use is put to the Thames by religions that use its waters for baptism and burial (in the form of scattering ashes). Offerings to rivers, wells and lakes still survive in today with the concept of the wishing well. Less well known is its equivalent, the cursing well, which received pins with which

the spirit of the waters could harm the hexed person. Offerings in the shape of a supplicant's limb that needs healing were made, and similar sympathetic magic was practised in London at the Roman Bridge. When the stone London Bridge was removed in 1832 a horde of coins, statues and images of pagan gods, some mutilated, were found at what would have been the centre of the older Roman crossing. At one time it was thought that the disfigured pagan images might have been the result of destructive Christian religious zeal. However their deliberate positioning in the centre of the bridge, suggests that the damage was done to an afflicted part of the body that the supplicant wished to heal. Not all the offerings were found at the London Bridge site as recycling of bridge and dredged up material to construct the footpaths and Thames embankments meant that sacrifices originally made at London Bridge were still being discovered as far away as Putney in 1846. A blend of pagan and Christian rite can be seen in the activities of bridge-building guilds. Bridge construction was considered holy work by the Catholic Church and London’s citizens were encouraged to make offerings of land and money 'to God and the Bridge'. In 1176, during the reign of Henry II, it was Peter De Colechurch, a priest and head of the Fraternity of the Brethren of London Bridge, who began building the first stone bridge across the Thames. In Italy a branch of the white friars, Frères Pontifis or brothers of the bridges had a monopoly on bridge building for centuries. The Pope's title of sovereign pontiff derives from the chief priest of pagan Rome, the Pontifex Maximus or great bridge builder, himself a link between the divine and the mundane. In other religions bridges have to be crossed to reach paradise after death and the unworthy are turned back or made to wait endlessly on the bridge. Even after the church came along to extol the Christian virtues of land and money, human sacrifice to the deities of a bridge or river took place across Europe. Less disturbing offerings were made when the Thames bridges were constructed. At Blackfriars in 1760 an elaborate ceremony took place involving the burying of money and a plate under the central pile. To mark the start of work on Hammersmith Bridge in May 1825 there was a Masonic ceremony with the Duke of Sussex, Augustus Frederick doing the honours. In front of the Grand Lodge and a large crowd he performed a ritual that involved the fixing of a brass plate (praising the builders and designer) over one of the coffer dams into which had been placed gold coins and a silver trowel. As this was put in place the Duke poured corn over it saying: 'I have poured the corn, the oil and the wine, emblems of wealth, plenty and comfort, so may the bridge tend to communicate prosperity and wealth.' When work started on Waterloo Bridge in 1939 coins, postage stamps and all the daily newspapers were placed within a copper cylinder in the cavity under the official foundation stone, cut out of a stone from the old bridge. This time capsule is obviously a

less sinister offering to the river than the child sacrifice, known to police as Adam, found under Tower Bridge in 2000, and not all of today's ceremonial sites have menacing overtones. In 2004 a Hindu shrine was found near Chelsea Bridge consisting of candles, brass symbols, pictures of deities and photographs. So trips to the foreshore can reveal traces of voodoo, Christianity and Hinduism beside the detritus of the gods of consumer culture: mobile phones, credit cards, toys and in one recent instance, again at Chelsea Bridge, a rubber sex toy. It is probably stretching a point though to suggest that the person who mislaid it was continuing the Celtic tradition of offerings to rivers to honour their sexual power and potency. The river Thames has its own folk god, Old Father Thames, who is frequently portrayed as a bearded man, echoing the features of the traditional guardians of the City itself, Gog and Magog. His name is in recognition that the river is father to the settlements on its banks. As the Romans prayed to Father Tiber, so Britons prayed to the Thames and fittingly there is a representation of Old Father Thames just upriver of Vauxhall Bridge on the southern shore. The poet John Burns said the Thames is full of liquid history with shrines and sacred sites lining its banks devoted to many religions.

Tired of life -London’s dead and what to do with them. One of the reasons there are so many tales of the dead returning in London is that people have been dying in the area for a very long time. Tribes settled the area millennia before the founding of the Roman Londinium, though, as far as I am aware, no one has ever reported pre Roman ghosts. Legionnaires on the other hand have been reported in the buildings around Cannon Street, the shades of men slaughtered by Boudicca and thrown in the river Walbrook. This disposal of bodies is just an early example of something that continued over the centuries, bodies found in river, canal, waste ground and field. This chapter though is more about the orderly distribution of London’s dead. For centuries there wasn’t too much of an issue as churches had their own graveyards and if these became full they could create new plots in the surrounding fields. It is true that the old city churchyards did become crowded as early as Elizabethan times but the real pressure came with London’s exponential growth from 1750 to 1900 when the old city burst its walls and the building of bridges followed by railways led to the population rising from half a million to about six. Old villages like Putney, Fulham and Brixton suddenly found themselves subsumed as part of a monster known as greater London. As the city grew so the patches of open land were filled in. New churches were built and graveyards laid out but they couldn’t hope to cope with the rising tide of the dead. Some churches reacted quickly and created new memorial gardens in, what were then, the suburbs. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s extraordinary St George’s in the West located its graveyard half a mile away near Kings Cross where it still exists as St George’s Gardens. The St James’ Church in Piccadilly started exporting its dead in the 18th century to some fields off the Hampstead Road not too far from Euston station. This has long since stopped being a burial place and for some years has been a children’s playground and there is a small plaque to suggest the site’s former role. However there is no indication that one of London’s foremost bigots and instigator of a five day reign of carnage in 1880, during which over 200 people were shot dead, Lord George Gordon, has his final resting place under the playground, though no one is certain where exactly. In 1886 during some excavations in Wapping workmen came across the remains of John Williams, the alleged Ratcliff Highway murderer of 1811, who killed himself in Coldbath Fields Prison. As a suicide, was buried at a crossroads of Commercial Road and Cannon Street with a stake through his heart. After his disinterment the nearby Dolphin public house kept the skull as an exhibit. This idea, of burying suicides, at crossroads was actually a part of English law until 1824 though a law more honoured in the breech than practise otherwise there would barely be a crossroads in the country without its own self murderer underneath. A Mr Griffiths buried at the junction of Eaton Place and Grosvenor Street in 1823 was last known case of this. Losing a body or two may seem careless but as old cemeteries were built over whole towns of dead people were quietly misplaced. Legends of lost plague pits abound in London as do references to old graveyards that now serve other purposes. Beneath a

former goods yard for nearby London Bridge Station on Redcross Way in Southwark is the Crossbones Graveyard. This has been made famous by a campaign to have part of it turned into a public garden after decades of dereliction and a century of being a Crossbones had been (before closure in the middle of the 19th century) a busy burial spot for Southwark’s poor. It was specifically referred to in 1598 by the historian John Stow as a place of burial for single women of no good family who refused to abandon a sinful life. This has been interpreted as meaning that Crossbones was where Southwark’s prostitutes were buried, more broadly that the graveyard’s 15,000 internees represent the outcast dead of the area, the poor, the lonely, the homeless and insane. Crossbones closed at about the time that London really started to address the issue of what to do about its dead. Some of the more magnificent ideas, including a giant pyramid on Primrose Hill where the city’s deceased could be laid out in their tens of thousands, were never built. Other schemes did go ahead and the remains of the so called Necropolis station can be seen on Westminster Bridge Road near Waterloo and there was a smaller funeral operation out of Kings Cross in North London. The former was the departure point to huge cemetery out in Surrey catering to various classes and denominations of Londoners the last of whom were delivered in the 1950s. Strange as it may seem there was some humour on the part of the death line operators with one way tickets and a bar advertising that “spirits are served here”. Sometimes the dead didn’t stay buried for long as the “Resurrection Men” worked to supply London’s hospitals with cadavers for anatomy classes, up until the 1832 Anatomy Act rather choked off their trade. This isn’t to say that the problem stopped in the 1830s just that the act allowed for a more plentiful supply of legitimate bodies. Prior to this a rapidly growing demand from the medical schools and a liberalisation of criminal law that meant fewer people were executed so the only legal supply (the bodies of executed felons) dried up. There are still other traces of the response to the crime of grave robbing as if one looks carefully near a few of London’s older cemeteries (notably St John’s off Tower Bridge Road) one can see the remains of sentry boxes used by the (then) newly created police force that guarded both the living and the dead. The grave robbers came up with ingenious ways of remaining out of the view of ordinary people by the construction of long tunnels in to fresh burials and the creation of ghost stories to scare away the curious. Conversely many people took serious precautions against being removed from their chosen burial spot by utilising lead coffins and other preventative measures. By the following century the reason for breaking into coffins changed as in Camberwell and, more famously, Highgate crypts were broken into by vampire hunters’ intent on laying the undead to rest. Highgate is one of the so called Magnificent Seven cemeteries built around London after the 1832 Cemeteries Act. These more or less circle the heart of the Victorian metropolis. Highgate, Abney Green, Tower Hamlets, Nunhead, Norwood, Brompton Road and Kensal Green are each incredible in their own way, still being used and all are the final resting place of some of London’s best known former citizens. Sometimes

though, the rest is not so final because the dead like to float. A feeder branch of one of London's buried rivers (the Effra) runs underneath West Norwood cemetery. This was found to be the explanation of a coffin found floating in the Thames in the nineteenth century. The ground beneath the coffin and above the Effra gave way allowing the coffin to be carried beneath the streets of Tulse Hill, Brixton and Oval before entering the Thames at Vauxhall. The grave itself remained intact.

Ye olde ghost story Although London has (as alluded to elsewhere) more than its share of ghost stories it never really owned the genre in quite the way Mr. Conan Doyle’s detective did in another. Noted spiritualist and believer in fairies Conan Doyle wrote a number of creditable spooky stories and even some of the Holmes tales flirt with the idea of the supernatural. Perhaps aspects of the Gothic tradition’s fondness for remote castle’s and the folktale’s staple of lonely moor, isolated farm house or abandoned church yard are just that bit more common in the countryside so making London a less favourable setting. However for some it is the terrible ordinariness of similar suburban housing or the loneliness amidst the crush of millions that make London work as a setting for the supernatural. Certainly the classic ghost tales associated with the Tower of London revels in its Londoness as does the famous house in Berkley Square. London’s weather in the form of the dreadful smogs can be well used as can the catalogue of shocking events traditionally associated with large cruel cities. One of the strangest London ghost stories in that of Jenny’s Hole near Robert Street just south of the Strand. Jenny was apparently a young flower girl or street walker (accounts differ) who was brutally murdered near the Adelphi. Her ghost manifests as a swirling bundle of rags or chilling improbable wind and victims who pass through the turbulence report feeling extremely uneasy and distressed despite seeing nothing. Around Jenny at the Adelphi, north to Covent Garden or south to the river are dozens of specters relating to theatrical types and other famous individuals as well as those of people who ended their days jumping off the fashionable (for suicides) Waterloo Bridge. Why Waterloo Bridge and not any of the others, though Tower did enjoy a brief vogue amongst self murderers, is slightly unclear but it may simply have been that a few early cases were widely publicised and followed up by a theatre production whose denouement featured someone leaping from that particular crossing. In the twentieth century figures are reported leaping off a number of bridges only to disappear making no splash when they hit the water. It would also appear that a city gets the phantoms it deserves. There are very few London ones which actively try and warn people to change their behaviour or help them out, which anyone who has tried ask directions in the West End would probably reflect as accurate for the living as well. They do act as other kinds of pointers though, so the ghosts of princes in the Tower is a means by which we think of evil Richard the Third or the ghost of Anne Boleyn reminds us that Henry the Eighth might not be very good when it comes to paying alimony. Nor need the individuals themselves be celebrities to highlight a historical truth. The Ship Inn at the back of Holborn tube, although an 1820s rebuild, retains from an earlier building the ghost of a priest who had been shut up in a so called priest hole and forgotten about when the Protestant Queen’s men had raided the building. This conveys the whole idea about religious differences rather well as does the following tale of post death punishment.

The ghosts of Parliamentarian leaders Bradshaw, Trenton and Cromwell supposedly haunt Red Lion Square the square after their corpses spent the night in the nearby Red Lion Tavern. The three men were dug up from their actual resting places, put on trial and then “executed” for the crimes they committed whilst alive, most notably the execution of Charles 1st. The idea of hanging and then drawing and quartering cadavers which had been in the ground some time is grotesque but an interesting way of making a point that Charles II was none too happy with the people who had, in his view, murdered his father. The figures are supposed to be seen walking about the square debating political topics of the day. There is something about transport in general, not just underground that excites the supernatural. Dickens’s Signalman is in many ways the first modern ghost story. Haunted boats are practically a genre to themselves and London is replete with tale of phantom locomotives and headless train travelers who made the classic error of sticking their head out of the train window. Alongside these are spirit buses in Notting Hill and peculiar commuters joining everyone else on the platforms before oddly vanishing. One of the saddest London stories concerns the sinking in 1989 of the Marchioness with the loss of 51 lives after it collided with the dredger the Bowbelle under Cannon Street Railway Bridge. At the inquest into the accident it was reported that 51 seagulls were always afloat on the Thames outside the building it was held reflecting the traditional belief that sailors’ souls migrate to birds London is gossipy city and also one with a rough sense of humour so it is perhaps fitting that the ghost equal top for association with the most haunted locations is Grimaldi. Grimaldi practically invented the modern concept of the clown and was the first to wear what is now the standard make up. The fact that not many people knew his real face meant he was able to deliver the tragic response to his doctor that he was Gramaldi when the physician suggested that a trip to see Grimaldi might cheer him up. There are also a number of animal apparitions from bears at the Tower of London to that of a little dog who lost its tail defending his master from the press gang at the Anchor pub at Bankside. For many years up to the middle of the 20th century people spoke of strange occurrences at the Church of St Michael Paternoster near the northern approach to Southwark Bridge. Mostly what they reported was being brushed by a cat when no such animal should have been in the building. The church is a 17th century rebuild of the original, where Dick Whittington had worshipped, destroyed in the Great Fire. During the Second World War it was hit by a bomb and in the rebuilding work which followed the war the mummified remains of a cat was found at the foot of a tower. Most ghost stories don’t have such a neat conclusion, in particular the apparently motiveless, and equally apparently fake, haunts of Peckham and Hammersmith. Now of course one could easily argue that all ghosts are fake but one can understand the story behind some better than others, the unavenged murder victim crying for justice for example. Alternatively when smugglers tell tales of a haunted bit of coast there is clearly an element of self interest at play, they want to scare people away from a particular area. The point about the Peckham and Hammersmith ones is that there is clearly

human involvement and both aroused so much concern in their respective neighbourhoods that anti ghost vigilante patrols were set up. In Peckham members of the local athletics club were suspected on account the “ghost’s” ability to remove itself from places very rapidly. More worryingly in Hammersmith in 1804 an anti ghost committee member, Francis Smith, shot to death an innocent passer by mistaken for the phantom. After much legal argument Smith was convicted of, and executed for murder. Obviously dressing up as a ghost could be a dangerous prank though sometimes it is possible to gain a financial advantage by it. So when John Rennie’s 1830 London Bridge was rebuilt in Lake Havasu Arizona the opening day crowds were favoured with the sight of three women in Victorian costume flitting across it which the owners claimed were genuine English shades. This Scooby Doo style gambit was also attempted this century when the themed attraction London Tombs opened underneath the current London Bridge. Building work was temporarily halted when an unplotted cemetery was discovered. There followed tales of workmen feeling uneasy and culminated in a group of people, including myself, spending the night underground in the haunted and half completed museum. The result was a good deal of spirits consumed but none seen, however this has not stopped the owners hiring out the venue to corporate ghost hunting organisations. I had always assumed that wraith hunting was a local affair; that one trooped up to a nearby haunted vicarage and sat around with recording equipment. After being hired as what was in effect the pre match entertainment, in other words to take people on a tour of the area prior to their admission to the venue, I realised my error. For a start people had travelled from the far corners of the country and also were gamely prepared for an expensive all nighter quite actively seeking specters. It is a lucrative world of medium workshops, paranormal training and sensitivity awareness often delivered by volunteers or trainees on behalf of the main organisation. At one point there were several rival outfits in operation one of whom was clear in their belief that they should take precedence because they were the only one based in London. Local spooks for local people as it were.

Strange Beasts, Lost Zoos and odd burials. It isn’t the first thing that people usually associate with London but the place is teeming with wildlife, 10,000 lions alone. There are war memorials to animals, statues to commemorate those involved in vivisection as well as streets named after bear baiting venues, quaysides where rare animals were imported, phantoms of beasts, the grave of a Nazi dog and a lost zoo. No city should be careless enough to lose a zoo but London managed it when the Surrey Zoological Gardens late of Walworth shut its gates in the 1860s. Actually it didn’t entirely shut its gates it become a different kind of venue before being covered by housing including Manor Place baths and part of the Pullens Estate in the 1880s. The zoo had been created after the closure of the Exeter Exchange menagerie whose star attraction, Chunee the elephant, ran amok on the Strand. The collection was added to when Britain’s first giraffes were walked through Walworth at night from barges on the (now filled in Grand Surrey Canal) in order not to alarm the residents. The zoo struggled though after the royal collection of animals traditionally housed at the Tower of London was bequeathed to the rival North London zoo. The Tower collection stretched back centuries and in the grounds are buried big cats, polar bears and other exotic creatures given to the British royal family. The royal family were not alone in collecting non native species and for three generations in the 18th and 19th centuries a family of importers known as Jamrach operated a very profitable business not far from the Tower at Wapping. They boasted they could import anything. A claim strongly tested by a Bengal tiger who, arriving wet, hungry and not a little put out at Wapping, found its wooden crate not fit for purpose. With a minimal amount of effort it freed itself and loped off down Wapping High Street. Coming the other way was a little boy fairly excited at the prospect of petting this rather large pussy cat. Sadly where one side saw a playmate, the other saw “lunch” and but for swift action by the middle member of the Jamrach clan freeing the boy from the animal’s jaws their business might have suffered a good deal of adverse publicity. That peculiar animals should come into the country via London is assumed in much of 19th century fiction. When Conan Doyle wishes to enliven a Holmes mystery or show his detective hero as knowledgeable about more than the various types of clay found around the metropolis he introduces exotic creatures. Likewise much later writers play on similar fears of exotic creatures taking over, perhaps the best example of this genre being James Herbert’s Rats trilogy. More amusing is the fascination for strange creatures held by the new romantic poets. Gabriel Rosetti was not only responsible for a by law that still holds in parts of Chelsea banning the keeping of peacocks but also wrote an ode to his favourite creature of all, the wombat which runs. Oh how the family affections combat Within this heart, and each hour flings a bomb at My burning soul! Neither from owl nor from bat Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat.

In the 21st century there are still exotic creatures in London but they have gone native. Skipping over the American grey squirrel and numerous species of fish and tree there are the parakeets which have made it as far east as Deptford. The probably apocryphal story behind the arrival of these birds whose bright green plumage enlivens London’s park and whose quarrelsome chatter provokes the violence of the native feral pigeon population is beautiful, if improvable. The story is that during the 1950s filming of the African Queen (starring Humphrey Bogart and Kathleen Turner) at Pinewood Studios on the Thames west of London a flock of the parakeets escaped. Since then they have been breeding and moving steadily eastwards along the river. There are tales of big cats roaming the London area that also might be better suited to Africa. The beast of Sydenham (south London) is perhaps the best known but around the capital are reported sightings of pumas, leopards and other carnivores prowling the back gardens and suburban rail networks. The popular theory (using the word popular in its loosest context and ignoring the obvious possibility of Tiddles on steroids) is that these are descendants of animals released after the 1970s Dangerous Animals Act which introduced a measure of control to the importation, collection and keeping of mega fauna in Britain. Up until then, provide it didn’t bother –or indeed eat- the neighbours one could keep a panther in a maisonette flat in Balham and no one would mind in the least, except possibly the animal in question. Tales of giant Black Dogs as precursors to death were brought to London by migrants from the countryside. However the version told about Amen Court near St Paul’s Cathedral definitely has some variations in it. The black dog lurked about the area prior to executions at Newgate prison and is supposed to be a manifestation of ghost of a former prisoner called Schoiler. Schoiler suffered the misfortune to be eaten by other prisoners and thereafter appeared before any death in the guise of a black dog. The destruction of the prison and the building of the Old Bailey court house on the same site (albeit with the same stones) appear to have decreased sightings more than somewhat. If the tale of that black dog leaves you shaking your head you may have issues with the story of a brown one, even if it begins quite logically. Once upon a time, in Battersea south London, the local authority commissioned a statue to be placed in the Latchmere housing estate. This statue was of a brown dog who was supposed to represent all the dogs used in experimentation from vivisection to shampoo testing. The local people loved the dog statue and were happy to have it in their neighbourhood but medical students were outraged by it, seeing it as a knock to on their profession. When a group of them marched on the Latchmere intent on destroying the statue they were repelled by gangs of locals. The argument simmered with an anti-vivisection march in Trafalgar Square (swelled by Latchmere residents) attacked by mobs of medical students some of whom had dead dogs on poles. After a change of leadership in the council the statue disappeared from the Latchmere (rumour has it that it lies in the Thames) but in the 1980s a replacement Brown Dog statue was placed in Battersea Park where it remains to this day.

So we have a black dog and a brown one now perhaps is time for a brown shirt dog. Under a tree at Carlton House near the statue to the Grand Old Duke of York off the Mall is a small tombstone on which is written in German “Giro he was a faithful friend”. Giro was the faithful friend of a mid-1930s German ambassador and Carlton House was then the German Embassy. Such was the attachment to the animal that the story goes he was buried with full military (for which at this point in history read Nazi) honours, the only time such a ceremony took place on the British mainland. However such is the British fondness for animals that even at the height of the Blitz no one thought of digging up Giro, the Nazi dog. A few miles from Giro’s last resting place at the junction of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens is a pet cemetery opened in the 1890s after the then park keeper’s daughter’s dog was an early victim of the motor car. The fame of the cemetery grew and after less than a decade it closed because the park keeper’s garden was no longer fit for planting anything as it had been filled up with the remains of Rover, Hammy, Mr Splash and others. London it seems is a place where we’ve no room to bury our creatures anymore but perfectly happy to believe strange ones roam the streets from Queen Rat (mentioned elsewhere) and shape shifting creatures like the terrible Lizard Lady who, though native to the Amazon, settled near the Elephant and Castle to mermaids in the pools of parks.

Walking the streets the stories came from. With each hard back edition of the stories in One Eye Grey there was a walk to celebrate the launch, to take the stories back to the streets they came from as the slightly pretentious slogan went. There are of course eight million stories in the naked city and rather a lot of walks. On the website (www.fandmpublications.co.uk) there is a map of story locations and also the opportunity to hear snippets of talks about them. There is also, if you book via, www.londonstreettours.co.uk the chance to walk the tours with a guide. Downloads for phones are being planned but below there are brief outlines of some of the cycle and foot tours devised in conjunction with the publications and one walk you can try yourself. It should all take less than an hour, without deviations. OEG1: Folk Lore Tour. Queen Rat of Queenshythe, The Great Worm of Bankside and the peculiar case of the mummified cat all feature on this strange tour of London's waterfront encompassing the site of allegedly Europe's only prostitutes' cemetery. Loosely based on the themes of sex and disease the tour explains why people for centuries came south for pleasure and also the concentration of hospitals and medical study in the vicinity. OEG2: Waterloo and Vauxhall. William Blake, Spring Heeled Jack, dead sailors, weird tombs, the woman who started the French revolution and some stuff about the real spooks at MI5 & MI6. OEG3: St Giles and Holborn. Black magic, screaming queens, of the Egyptian variety, haunted clocks, incompetent executioners and much else as it meanders from the British Museum to the Old Curiosity Shoppe. OEG4: Heaven & Hell Walk. Wizards, mystics, visionaries, quacks, giants, criminals, brawling women, holy warriors and parading bears as well as sites of sacred wells, strange theatre, a midget wedding, an impromptu witch ‘swimming’ and much more around Clerkenwell. OEG5: Troglodyte pigs and syrup of figs. Herds of feral swine, a well hung Italian, giant dogs, huge rats and the ghost of the pig nosed princess all feature on this stroll around Blackfriars. OEG6:Too many broken hearts go floating down the river. Love stories in reverse featuring headless queens, golden castration devices, deceased lovers and phantom ex wives. All these as well as voodoo, why life is cheaper on the surrey shore, sex, suicide and showmen on Tower Bridge and the usual medley of monsters, myth and folkloric fun. OEG7: Don't you want to go to Chelsea? Dogs on sticks, ghost bears, lavatory humour, satanic sports venues, secret agents, vampires, phantom Eskimos, wombats,

ultra violence and suicidal sea captains. More bonkers tales than you can shake a stick (with or without a dog attached) at. OEG8: New Cross Dark Arts walk. Ghosts and ghost hunters, witchcraft and the devil, an exploding chip shop and boozers from beyond the grave. OEG9: Let's go down the Strand! I beg your pardon we never promised you Covent Garden. You can find Barbara Streisand's underwear on the Strand, why the bowler hat disappeared from the streets of London. There are also stories about a smelly lamp, a bunch of ghosts and a mad elephant. OEG10: Brockwell Park is waiting in the dark! Wild West heroes, a cure for impotence, the devil's fruit and deadly mermaids are just part of the cast in this stroll around Brixton's magnificent Brockwell Park. Tree folklore and local legends combine in a bonkers trek. Fright bikes: The spoken word. FB1: Ghostly polar bears, well hung pirates, the origin of the jolly roger, ghostly barmaids and phantom hunts can be expected to be mentioned if not actually seen. London Bridge to Deptford. FB2: The ride of a lifetime past the former homes of magicians, film stars and inventors. We've ghosts on stilts and angels in trees. Marvel at tales of dead dancers, giant cats, lost canals and migrant beauties. It's Surrey with a fright on top! It's Walworth, Peckham and Nunhead! FB3:Plague pits, ghostly polar bears, spectral cats and nobility. There are also well hung pirates and hanging judges amongst the cast of Wapping tales and Thameside shocks on this cycle ride around the docks and old canals of Wapping. FB4: Stations of the Dead. Spectral Eskimo babies, dueling prime ministers and ghostly royalty alongside some spooky barges and unlikely (but true) folklore. Beautiful hidden buildings, gorgeous bits of riverfront and some rather attractive parkland also feature in this nicely languid loop starting and finishing at Waterloo and ending at Lambeth, where the lambs were landed dontcha know? FB5: Buried prostitutes, lost zoos, hidden rivers, failed revolutions and wild west heroes are just some of the features visited on this trip through a few of south London's parks. There's the enigmatic Matrimony place, not at all rude Newington Butts and larks in Larkhall, starts in Southwark, ends in Lambeth -God's own country as they say in the tourist brochures.

Self Guided Walk: London Bridges Loop Start the walk at the spike on the south side of London Bridge station. The spike is there as a sort of permanent tribute to all the traitors or criminals whose heads were once put on the approach to Old London Bridge as a warning not to misbehave in London town. An understandable warning as Southwark (the south side of the bridge) for centuries tolerated gambling, prostitution and all manner of cruelty to animals. Cross over the bridge to the North side admiring the large building to the right constructed on a Roman temple and pause to think about Mary Overie whose father was killed whilst pretending to be dead. You might also hum the nursery rhyme London Bridge and admire the views. At the north side there is a small staircase on your right leading down to the river. Take it and ignore the smell. Once under London Bridge head West (away from Tower Bridge if that helps) and try not to think about the boatloads of Jewish exiles who haunt this spot or the traditional sacrifices to the river that went on here. Keep going along the north bank under Cannon Street Railway Bridge and pause to consider the ghosts of Roman centurions slaughtered on this spots whose heads were thrown in the Walbrook stream. You might, if the tide is out, go down Walbrook Stair to the riverbank for a spot of mudlarking. Alternatively you could stop at the Banker for a snack or head on through the last bit of working dock in Central London which now exports the city’s rubbish. Go under Southwark Bridge near St Micheal Paternoster which was haunted by a ghostly cat but before you get as far as the old Queenshythe (port where Queens landed) go up onto Southwark Bridge and cross back south. When you descend on the southside head west towards the Globe which is interesting but if you stop just before it you’ll see Bear Alley where London’s largest bear baiting arena once stood. Turn back on yourself and under Southwark Bridge Southside will get you to the Anchor pub where diarist Samuel Pepys stayed during the great fire of London and wrote about the flaming city. From the Anchor either head back to London Bridge via the Clink prison museum and Borough Market or turn tight down Park Street then right again onto Redcross Way and after crossing the main road (Southwark Street) stop at the world’s only cemetery (or rather former cemetery) to prostitutes.

Reviews: 'A pocket horror show, far from dreadful and worth every penny.' Time Out. (http://www.fandmpublications.co.uk/pages/timeout.jpg) of One Eye Grey 1 (Dollar Dreadful 1) 'A-price-of-a-pint-of-Stella rather than a shilling shocker' the Guardian (http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2169225,00.html) of One Eye Grey 2 (Dollar Dreadful 2) ‘A dread good read. Inspired by a century old genre but addressing timeless fears in a modern voice, (One Eye Grey) will be scaring commuters witless for a long time to come.’ Southwark News Weekender (http://www.southwarknews.co.uk/00,news,7716,444,00.htm) of One Eye Grey 3 (Dollar Dreadful 3) 'Delightful Fortean stocking filler with -hooray!- more to come next year'. Fortean Times of One Eye Grey 1-3 (Dollar Dreadfuls 1-3) If you were to put this magazine of short stories into a genre it would be horror, but this is rather gentle, spooky rather than terrifying, smart rather than gory, horror. And it’s heavily based on the folklore and history of London, so it’s not just writers dreaming up nightmares, but rather resurrecting ancient ones. My London, Your London blog. http:// mylondonyourlondon.com/?p=276 Now I just found about something called One eye grey which is described as tales of folklore and horror stories from another London and also a collaborative effort bringing together people who fancied creating something chilling and pocket sized to read on the tube. It can’t be better! http://supersole.net/blog/post/33-one-eye-grey-contemporarylondon-horror-stories Oddly enough, as I was setting out to Newcastle Central Station for a trip to London last Friday, I received the latest copy of One Eye Grey. Entitled 'The Last of the Chelsea Smilers', it consists of more macabre and downright weird tales of London. How much of a coincidence was that?!? Not much, really, but I'm easily impressed. Anyway, it's a good collection. I read much of it on the train down and found myself enjoying stories that informed me what a preternaturally ghastly metropolis I had decided to spend a weekend in. http://suptales.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/one-eye-grey.html Two stories from the collections were also featured in BBC Radio Four’s 2010 London Season. One of which can be found at www.fandmpublications.co.uk with other readings of the stories for the Liars’ League of London and Pagan Radio.

Hard copies of the original magazines, maps of the story locations, readings, background information and walking tours of London relating to the tales are available at the F and M Publications website www.fandmpublications.co.uk If you have any questions about the stories, the background legends or any other comments please contact [email protected]