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Met not ‘robust and determined enough’ about standards says Mark Rowley

The new Met commissioner appeared before the London Assembly's police and crime committee for the first time in his new role
Charles Wright

The Metropolitan Police Service has let down Londoners and urgent changes are needed to rebuild policing by consent, the new Met commissioner Mark Rowley admitted today during his first appearance before the London Assembly’s police and crime committee as the capital’s chief police officer.

Rowley took over as Met commissioner in September, succeeding Cressida Dick who resigned in April following a clash with Sadiq Khan over her plans for boosting public confidence in the police. His frank description of what he has inherited will not have been easy listening for his predecessor.

“What really struck me was pretty much a straight line percentage fall in confidence in the Met over the past four years, from the high 60s to the high 40s, with some communities and geographies where it is much lower than that,” he said.

There were “too many examples” of officers behaving appallingly, and inconsistent responses from senior officers, he added. “I’ve heard too many black and women colleagues saying they have had unpleasant experiences in the organisation which had been dealt with too feebly.”

Rowley said further evidence of the scale of the challenge would be revealed in the review into the Met’s culture and standards by veteran troubleshooter Louise Casey, commissioned by Dick last years, and which would be published shortly.

“It will show we haven’t been as robust and determined about maintaining high standards as we should have been,” he said. Standard setting had been inconsistent, with a “lack of confidence from leaders on where to draw a line in terms of behaviour that is just not appropriate in a modern organisation”.

The “good majority” of officers, who had a “real appetite for clearer standards and a stronger approach”, had also been let down, Rowley said. But it was wrong to talk of “bad apples”, or service attitudes reflecting those in wider society.

“We enforce the law, we have unique powers given to us by Parliament, and you can’t have the trust of citizens if are not aiming for the highest standards in terms of your own integrity,” he said. “We can’t be average. We have to be above the average.”

As well as his new push on rooting out attitudes and behaviours he described as “corrupting” the integrity of the service, the new commissioner set out plans to beef up neighbourhood police teams, with closer working with communities, and to address day-to-day concerns, including response times, chronicled in last month’s critical Inspectorate of Constabulary report which saw the Met put under a higher level of scrutiny and support.

Under a new mantra – “more trust, less crime, high standards” – Rowley also highlighted an overhaul of management supervision and a focus on updating technology for “command and control” response to emergencies and case management to avoid “delivering something that looks like Woolworths policing in an Amazon age”.

And he expressed caution over the now former Home Secretary Priti Patel’s urgings in a letter last month that the Met’s current allocation of some 4,500 extra police officers should be in place by the end of March next year.

“Just recruiting headlong without bringing the right people in with the right support could be destabilising. I am concerned about whether it’s possible or wise to go at that pace,” he said, adding that he was now “reviewing” that deadline.

Responding to questions from committee chair Susan Hall, leader of the Assembly’s Conservative group, Rowley said the environmental protests currently underway, including blocking roads in central London, had not reached the threshold of serious disruption which would justify tougher police action.

The protests had taken up the equivalent of 2,156 officer days over 11 days, he said, with 338 arrests. “But the law is very clear that just blocking a road in itself is not serious disruption,” he added. “I would love to close this down more quickly but I don’t have the legal power to do that.”

The police and crime committee meeting can be viewed in full here.

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Categories: News
Tags: Cressida Dick, crime, Mark Rowley, Metropolitan Police, policing

London should have own strategy for attracting international students, says new report

The document argues there is a "clear case" for a specific London approach to encouraging and reassuring higher education students from overseas
Dave Hill

London should have its own international education strategy for maximising its appeal for overseas students, backed by national government and City Hall and with a dedicated London champion, according to a new report.

London Higher, the organisation representing over 40 universities in the capital, argues that there is “a clear case” that a specific London approach to “increasing London’s attractiveness to international education markets” would be in line with both existing government higher education policy and what it calls the new government’s “national plan for growth”.

The document’s co-authors, London Higher chief executive Diana Beech and programmes, communications and research officer Emily Dixon, stress the need for a “collaborative effort” to enhance the capital’s already “unrivalled” appeal for international students and researchers by addressing some significant challenges. They place “personal safety concerns, global security threats, affordability and environmental concerns” at the top of their list.

A report for the government published last year said more than 70,000 first year students had been enrolled in London’s array of higher education institutions in 2018/19, more than one quarter of the UK total. The government’s international education strategy, produced in 2019 and updated last year, claims the country’s post-Brexit “new independent trade policy” will “deliver more opportunities for education providers” backed by £100 million, and “should be seen as the embodiment of our Global Britain ambitions”.

London Higher’s case for a distinct London strategy emphasises both the variety of the city’s universities and higher education colleges – ranging from large, multi-faculty institutions to specialist research institutes and drama schools – and London’s role as “an introduction and an open doorway for international students and researchers wanting to engage with British higher education”.

It contests the view that students from other countries takes places away from British people, pointing out that international students’ fees make a major contribution to funding courses and research that might otherwise not be afforded. It has been estimated that a single year’s cohort of international students in London has a net economic impact of £88 million.

Beech and Dixon say that despite London being a generally safe city, the impact of recent murders of women, terror attacks and violent offending using knives may weaken London’s attraction for prospective students, for whom personal safety and a sense of being welcome are important considerations.

The expense of studying in London can be another deterrent. “If students believe that London is a fun, vibrant global city with good opportunities but do not believe they can afford to live there, this poses a significant problem for London’s higher education institutions,” the report says. Accommodation costs are highlighted as a particular issue, along with fees.

The report asks London Mayor Sadiq Khan to take steps to ensure the capital’s research and development sector is securely protected, to create “a London-wide kitemark for international education pathway providers” to give students reassurance, to help ensure purpose-built student accommodation remains affordable, and to provide City Hall resources for promoting both the capital’s opportunities for students from around the world and the value their presence has for Londoners and their city.

The government is asked to establish the position of International Education Champion for London to support the national champion already in place, to pilot “a new, single pathway student visa” and to provide better guidance and advice to make it easier for international students to progress to post-graduate study.

The report urges London’s universities and higher education colleges themselves to take a range of steps to maximise overseas student take-up, including the use of alumni networks, “consideration of a more nuanced fee structure or bursary system” to draw students from developing countries, and a “willingness to engage” with anxieties about safety, inclusiveness and the environment through London Higher’s networks.

“This International Strategy for London is only the start of the conversation about how the city’s higher education sector can remain at the heart of the government’s plan for growth in the international education arena,” the document concludes.

Read the International Education Strategy for London document in full HERE. Image from document cover.

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Categories: News
Tags: Diana Beech, education, higher education, London Higher

John Griffiths: City Corporation’s ‘destination’ initiative carries a degree of risk

It's a bold, post-Covid bid to make the Square Mile a place of fun as well as work, but it faces some difficult headwinds
John Griffiths

Destination City is the strapline the City of London Corporation is using to reboot and re-position the Square Mile as it looks to recover from the ravages of the pandemic. The Chairman of Policy and Resources, and de facto leader of the City’s Council, Chris Hayward, describes this £2.5 million per annum flagship initiative as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to redefine the City and enhance its leisure offer”. Like some of the street artists performing at Saturday’s all-day launch event, he is engaging in a high-wire act while facing some tricky, prevailing headwinds.

Critical to the promotion of Destination City is the delivery of an annual programme of large-scale events designed to have mass appeal and become a regular fixture in London’s cultural calendar. Spectacle is something the City is extremely good at. However, its recent pitch-perfect commemoration of the late Queen has also delayed and set back the launch preparations.

Other countervailing pressures threaten to undermine Destination City and should compel the corporation to tread carefully. The optics of launching what could be regarded simply as more “bread and circuses” against a backdrop of a growing cost of living crisis need consideration, as does their environmental impact at a time when the City is also promoting its climate action strategy and many European cities are turning their lights off.

The City is determined to press ahead, having recruited a new Destination team headed by a former New West End Company associate director of marketing. This Saturday’s launch attraction, The Golden Key, curated by BAFTA award-winning producers Coney, promises to be an “immersive take-over event”, featuring a range of theatre, games, and performances across the City’s iconic venues and outdoor spaces.

Whether it proves to be the key to more than just an evening of fun and entertainment by kick starting an enduring repositioning of the City of London is what is really at stake.

John Griffiths is a City of London Common Councillor for the Ward of Castle Baynard.

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Categories: Comment
Tags: Chris Hayward, City of London Corporation, COVID-19 London, culture

Government condemned for considering ‘shelving’ renters’ reform plans

Labour and Green politicians in London along with housing groups have reacted angrily to the reports
Dave Hill

Labour politicians in the capital have reacted angrily to reports that the government has been considering sidelining or even abandoning proposals for improving the rights of private renters developed under the premiership of Boris Johnson.

Sadiq Khan said “London’s 2.6 million renters face the constant threat of eviction” due to what he called “the outdated and ruthless no-fault eviction law” which campaigners have long fought to get ride of.

His housing deputy Tom Copley described the reported move as “an utter betrayal of private renters”, pointing out that reform was a 2019 general election manifesto commitment and adding that he considered the white paper published in advance of legislation to be “a very good start”.

The Times said this morning that ministers are “discussing shelving legislation” drawn up the now former levelling up secretary Michael Gove, which housing charity Shelter had greeted at its white paper stage as a “game changer” for private renters throughout England.

One government source was reported to have said the measures were “not considered a priority” by the new, Liz Truss-led administration and “would be delayed” and another said it intended to “wanted to scrap the measure entirely,” according to the Times. Reporter Steven Swinford tweeted that “Liz Truss is shelving” the Gove plans.

London Assembly members have also spoken out, with the Green Party’s Sian Berry taking to Twitter to mock the government’s goals in general, “not forgetting homelessness”, while Labour’s Sem Moema, who chairs the London Labour Housing Group and the Assembly’s housing committee, said she had received a letter from the government “just a few weeks ago”, which “promised these reforms were still in the pipeline”. Moema called their possible scrapping “devastating”.

Alicia Kennedy, director of Generation Rent, said she was “totally flabbergasted” by the possibility that the commitment to abolish “no-fault” evictions might be dropped, and Shelter, reacting to Jim Pickard of the Financial Times reporting that the government was “insisting” it hadn’t yet made up its mind about the issue, said renters “deserve better than this chaos”.

Last month, amid early uncertainty about the attitude of Liz Truss’s administration to policies pursued under Boris Johnson, Tom Copley told the Assembly’s housing committee it would be a “great shame” if what he called a “really important piece of legislation” failed to materialise, even though he and the Mayor felt its protections did not go far enough.

With steps to improve the rights of private tenants enjoying strong public support, shelving or dropping the plans is unlikely to improve the popular of the Conservatives in London, with a recent opinion poll finding support for the party running at just 22%, which, if it applied through Greater London would see the Tories lose every parliamentary seat they currently hold if a general election was held now.

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Categories: News
Tags: housing, private rented housing, Sem Moema, Sian Berry, Tom Copley

Cathy Ross: City of London bollards and their stories

They are indisputable symbols of the Square Mile, but what do they tell us about the history of its local authority?
Cathy Ross

The archetypal City of London bollard is octagonal and painted black with a red star collar and white lemon-squeezer top. Many carry the City’s coat of arms, the legend “City of London” and a date. The styling is Victorian but the dates are usually from the last quarter of the 20th century. Today, you can’t miss them. Inescapable parts of the Square Mile streetscape, they line the streets, hover near stations. They are clearly creatures of the City, indisputable symbols even.

City of London bollards have a lot to say, not just about what goes where on the pavements, but also about civic government. Contemplating the City’s bollards inevitably leads to contemplating the body that put them there, and it seems no coincidence that outbreaks of bollard-enthusiasm in the City seem to have occurred when the City Corporation felt itself to be under threat. 

The archetypal design emerged  in the second half of the 19th century, a time when the Corporation of London came under fierce attack from those who deemed it scandalously unfit to manage London’s modern needs. It was almost certainly the work of William Haywood, the Corporation’s controversial chief engineer. For Haywood, installing battalions of crested and dated cast-iron street furniture – lamp columns, ventilation posts, orderly bins, underground urinals and guard posts (the old name for bollards) – was one way of confounding the Corporation’s critics.

A second eruption of crested and dated street furniture occurred in the 1980s. Again this marked another period of existential unease on the part of the Corporation as London’s local government was shaken and stirred. This new generation of bollards sprang from the City’s “Corporate Identity Project”, launched in 1986 as an overtly defensive strategy: “From time to time in its long and distinguished history, the Corporation’s existence has been threatened and it is therefore of paramount importance that the service which it provides should be clear for all to see.’”

The project saw the City of London’s coat of arms hoisted onto street name plates, notice boards, litter bins, cast iron seating, housing blocks and green space signposts. Haywood’s bollards returned to the streets in force, restored 19th century examples joining brand new versions. The early 1990s proved the golden age for crested City bollards, coinciding as it did with the arrival of “heritage” as a legitimate look for the public realm. Haywood’s Victorian design was tweaked to accommodate modern pictogram road signs – creating an odd combination of old and new which somehow seems to suit the oddness of the City. 

Today, the Square Mile contains more bollards than ever before. The latest generation are clearly descended from the Victorian guard-posts, but have evolved into more streamlined creatures. No longer crested or dated, the City’s 21st century bollards are thinner, tougher and somehow less quaint. What is the threat today’s bollards speak to? It hardly needs saying that it is terrorist bombs rather than local government reorganisation.

These are hardcore bollards of a type first seen in 2005 when a line of them appeared in Shoe Lane outside the new Goldman Sachs headquarters building. They were described as “crash-rated bollard cores, onto which a large City of London replica bollard sleeve was secured, the final assembly resembling those non-crash-rated bollards seen elsewhere in the City.” 

Since 2005, the un-crested, hard-core bollards have multiplied. Looking at old photographs of Bank Junction is a salutary lesson in how quickly the look of streets can change. Elsewhere in the City, lines of black octagonal red-star bollards now stand alongside thick-set tubular steel ones, hefty cuboid blocks and faux-marble planters – all part of the City’s “hostile vehicle mitigation” infrastructure. 

Screenshot 2022 10 11 at 03.14.24

Are these bollards here to stay? One of the things I’ve learnt about the City’s bollards is that they move around more than you might think, coming and going as planners change their minds. Today, there’s a sea change in City streets as cycle ways and pavements are given more space. It’s not inconceivable that bollards will fall out of favour completely, particularly as planters with trees seem to offer better value all round as “hostile vehicle mitigation” measures and are more in tune with today’s values. 

On the other hand, bollards are adaptable as well as moveable: they can still play a role in place-making, even when the sense of place no longer requires a coat of arms. The future is perhaps vinyl wraps – as seen recently when hard-core bollards were dressed in colourful arty patterns to promote the Corporation’s culture mile (see above). It will be no surprise if the Corporation’s new enthusiasm for Business Improvement Districts includes a new look for the Square Mile’s bollards. My guess is the indisputable symbols will survive.

Cathy Ross is the author of Bollardology: Observing the City of London (Quickfry Books, £12.99).

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Categories: Culture
Tags: Bank station, City of London Corporation, Shoe Lane, terrorism

Russell Curtis: Croydon’s Conservative Mayor has put suburban resistance before home building

In tearing up the council's innovative design guide for development at its fringes, Jason Perry has prevented the benign construction of urgently needed housing in his borough
Russell Curtis

Announced with considerable fanfare in 2018, and becoming formal planning policy the following year, Croydon Council’s Suburban Design Guide supplementary planning document (SPD) was London’s first – and, even now, most ambitious – attempt at encouraging its woefully sparse outer areas to do more to meet the city’s housing needs.

The publication made no bones about its intentions. “The evolution of the suburbs to provide homes that will meet the needs of a growing population,” its introduction stated. It went on: “It must however be recognised that delivering approximately 10,000 homes in the suburban places of Croydon will result in an evolution of the existing character of suburban streets, and that the increased density of homes can impact on the amenity of existing residents if not properly managed.”

The guide was rightly heralded as a progressive and practical attempt to deliver new homes in those places best able to accommodate them, and it was quickly celebrated as an exemplar for how to sustainably densify the city’s fringes. Croydon’s in-house spatial planning team took home a planning award in 2019 and the guide was highly commended at the New London Awards the same year. From a personal point of view, it was an important reference for my architectural practice’s own small sites SPD in Lewisham, which was adopted by the council a year ago this month.

However, just three years on, Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide is no more. In May, the borough’s voters elected Conservative Jason Perry as their first Mayor. He had promised that one of his first acts if he won would be to revoke the “dreaded” SPD, which he claimed has “destroyed” Croydon’s character and led to the “destruction” of homes – a peculiar claim given the huge number of dwellings it had in fact enabled in a relatively short time.

The SPD had been produced in response to Sadiq Khan’s London Plan, which was first published in draft in 2017 but not formally adopted until March 2021. The Plan enshrined the need for the boroughs to consider the importance of small sites in meeting London’s housing needs. For the first time, every London planning authority was tasked with finding ways to encourage development on sites with a total area of less than a quarter of a hectare (roughly one third of a standard football pitch), with a ten-year small-site housing target set out in unequivocal terms.

Not only was this to be a way of delivering much-needed homes, the Plan also acknowledged the importance of nudging small-scale developers back to a market that had become dominated by a handful of volume housebuilders since the 2008 financial crash.

Inevitably, the draft Plan’s publication was met with hyperbolic outcry: a “war on the suburbs” is how Conservative London Assembly member Andrew Boff described the proposals, oddly failing to recognise that small-scale infill development tends to deliver a higher proportion of family homes than small flats; another bête noire of his.

After a robust challenge from several outer London boroughs, Khan was forced to dramatically reduce the small sites housing targets and blunt the “presumption in favour” the Plan had demanded. Having been required to deliver the highest absolute number of homes on small sites of any of the London planning authorities, Croydon Council received the greatest net reduction, with its ten-year target reducing from 15,110 to 6,410 – a drop of nearly 60%.

Croydon is one of London’s least dense boroughs, even when its 2,300 hectares of Green Belt and Metropolitan Open Land are excluded from the calculation. At 65 people per hectare, it has around a third the population density of Islington. Its number of homes per hectare is broadly the same as other similarly sized outer boroughs, such as Barnet and Kingston. And, like those boroughs, it clearly can accommodate many more.

In its defence, Croydon has delivered a lot of new homes in the last decade and a half—more than any other borough—so it’s perhaps fair to argue that the council had indeed “played its part” in meeting the city’s housing need. Yet the figures are misleading. Much of Croydon’s new development is concentrated in the urban centre, where clusters of tall residential towers have sprung up around East Croydon station within easy reach of central London.

This is good. Less good, however, is the quality of much of this new housing. Until halted by the implementation of an Article 4 Direction, more new dwellings were created under dubious permitted development rights, which allow commercial buildings to be cheaply converted to residential outside conventional planning permission, in Croydon than in any other borough. It’s not a statistic to be proud of given the sub-standard quality and small size of many of them. Until the introduction of the Suburban Design Guide, the leafier southern wards had got away without making much of a contribution.

Aware of the inherently risky nature of small sites, and that developers interested in taking them on are less able to absorb the cost of delayed or unpredictable planning decisions, the guide presented a series of suburban intensification methods which, if employed, were highly likely to be nodded through.

The acquisition of a pair of suburban semis – of which Croydon has many thousands – could easily lead to their replacement with a small block of flats at the front of the plot and mews houses in the rear garden. In this scenario, there could be a net gain of up to ten homes with no loss of family housing. The guide demanded that new development be no lower than three storeys – a not unreasonable request if we are to have any hope of densifying London’s laughably sparse peripheral areas.

Of course, this inevitably meant that some areas of the borough would experience some change, but that is a small price to pay for living in this great city. There would be benefits too. As the guide’s introduction made clear, higher housing density inevitably attracts local amenities and better social infrastructure – shops, restaurants, schools, healthcare and community facilities – that might actually mean suburbanites wouldn’t need to hop into their giant SUVs quite so often.

It’s no surprise that those areas most resistant to the principle of intensification tend to lie on the city’s fringes, and often consider themselves to be residents of the Home Counties rather than London. The Green Belt itself is often declared as an unnecessary and anachronistic constraint on the capital’s growth. There is some truth in this, but we should start by turning our attention inwards a little: it is the sparsely populated “greyfields” of outer London we need to tackle first.

The citizens of the suburbs must accept that the evolution of local character is a small price to pay for easy access to everything this wonderful city has to offer – and that it is also their duty to enable others to do the same. Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide was a valiant and progressive attempt to achieve this. We should mourn its passing.

Russell Curtis is the founder of RCKa architects and oversees its commercial and residential infill projects. Follow Russell on Twitter. This article was originally published by Planning in London. On London is grateful for blessing to reproduce it. Photo from Jason Perry election campaign video.

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Categories: Comment
Tags: Andrew Boff, Croydon, housing, RCKa Architects

John Vane’s London Stories: Tales of hungry children

Perhaps there's less to some of them than there seems, but they aren't in short supply.
John Vane

There are lots of stories about hungry London children, told as tales of hardship or neglect. One concerns a very young child on a school trip. All schools provide free school meals to pupils of this one’s age, but not, it seems, packed lunches in this case.

As is traditional on such excursions across town, the travelling infant learners made in-roads into their supplies on the morning outward journey, leaving them depleted on arrival – depleted, but not wholly devoured. When lunchtime came, they sat together to finish what was left, though not the child in question, who had had less to begin with and now had none at all. And so, the child mimed eating instead. Appearances matter, even when you’re only five.

That, at any rate, is the story that reached me through the grapevine. Another is more firmly sourced. Again, it concerns a school trip and packed lunches, but in this case the child was older – nine or ten. In this case, the school provided for those who qualify for free school meals, and when lunch time was over it emerged that more had been prepared than were required.

“Does anyone want those?” the child inquired. It seemed not. “Can I take it home for my family?”

You can’t be sure you’ve got the whole story. You can’t be sure that back at home there were hungry mouths to feed. Perhaps the packed lunches had been so delicious the child wanted more. Perhaps disapproval of waste had been firmly instilled. But these possibilities were thought doubtful by the source for the story, who knows something of the child concerned.

Other such tales that are not hard to find: children who turn up having had no breakfast; staff bringing in their own food to compensate. Some may be exaggerations, some rooted in mistaken assumptions, but they don’t seem to declining in number.

John Vane writes word sketches of London and bits about its past. Sometimes he makes things up. Follow John on Twitter.

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Categories: Culture, John Vane's London Stories
Tags: child poverty, cost of living, education

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 239: Monmouth House

The magnificent Soho dwelling was one of the many homes of a vaunted noble who came to a very bad end
Victor Keegan

Soho Square was built during the reign of Charles II and originally called King Square, though not in honour of the sovereign. It was named after Gregory King who, in the 17th century, was mainly responsible for laying out the streets and squares in an area previously known as Soho Fields.

This was a political square. If St James’s Square, close to St James’s Palace, the home of Charles’s younger brother James – the Duke of York and heir apparent – was Tory Town, packed with Tory supporters of a hereditary monarchy, then Soho Square was Whigsville.

It was intended to be a safe haven for the nobility, particularly the Whig nobility, who wanted a Protestant successor to Charles, not James, who had converted to Catholicism. Noble Whig families, such as the Bedfords, controlled much of the land in the area.

The most important building in Soho Square was Monmouth House. It was big, occupying the whole of the south side (arrowed below) and the land between what have been known since that time as Greek Street and Frith Street, which was named after Richard Frith, one of its builders. This extravaganza was created for James Scott, otherwise known as the charismatic but ill-fated Duke of Monmouth, the eldest and most senior of Charles’s 14 illegitimate children.

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Scott was very rich, a successful soldier and very popular, at least with Whigs and the populace at large. If the Whigs had succeeded in preventing James from succeeding Charles II – they failed, as in February 1685 he became James II – then Monmouth, though he never said so in public, would have been a candidate for King, or at least for the role of the most dominant noble despite his illegitimacy. He owed his wealth to lavish gifts bestowed on him by his father.

The Duke rarely lived at Monmouth House. He and his wife Anna had plenty of other places in which to linger, including Colman Hedge Close, a large estate nearby which was his domain as King Charles’s Master of the Horse. His main London residence was the original Palace of Westminster, off today’s Whitehall.

Further afield there was Windsor Castle, which he greatly expanded, plus Chiswick House and Moor House at Rickmansworth 14 miles away, which he restored. Oh, and he also bought a house in Bishopsgate in order to promote the Whig cause among the City’s businessmen.

Why on Earth with all these homes did he need Monmouth House as well, even though he got a surprisingly good deal out if it? The architectural historian Sir Simon Thirley points out that the house contained several large rooms that were constructed not as reception rooms but as meeting places for Whig sympathisers. It was all part of the geography of politics at that time.

After James’s accession it was all downhill for Monmouth. Having been linked to plots to seize the throne he’d been forced to flee abroad. Now, he did indeed attempt to become King. His small army landed at Lyme Regis with a handful of supporters. He attracted several thousand more as he marched hesitantly towards London, but they were poorly trained and on 6 July 1685. He was easily defeated by the Crown’s forces at the Battle of Sedgemoor near Bridgwater.

The captured Monmouth was brutally executed without trial on Tower Hill on 15 July 15, Parliament having passed an Act of Attainder sentencing him to death as a traitor. His followers were also sentenced to death or transported to distant lands by the notorious Judge Jeffries.

After Monmouth’s death his house in Soho Square entered a period of slow decline. Its various owners included his wife the Duchess who bought it outright  in 1698 only to sell it in 1716 to Sir James Bateman, Lord Mayor of London and sub governor of the South Sea Company.

Bateman died the following year but the house remained in his family, whose name is remembered thanks to Bateman’s Buildings, which stand on the site of the great house, and Bateman Street, which crosses Frith Street.

By 1770 Soho Square was in decline as fashionable people moved westwards. Monmouth House had become a white elephant and was dismantled in 1773 for redevelopment. It might have changed the course of history – but it didn’t.

All previous instalments of Vic Keegan’s Lost London can be found here and a book containing many of them can be bought here. Follow Vic on Twitter and also as @LondonStreetWalker.

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Categories: Culture, Lost London
Tags: Frith Street, Greek Street, Soho Square, Tower Hill