Fights and Festivities at Hockley Hole

From The Annual Register, January 15th 1763:
‘A man was found in Fleet Ditch standing upright and frozen to death. He had, it seems, unfortunately mistaken his way in the night and slipped into the mud; and being in liquor could not disentangle himself.’

(It seems that this unfortunate was a barber from Bromley, which only goes to show that people from the suburbs have always been coming to grief on nights out ‘up west’.)

The Coach is a recently renovated pub in a curious backwater just west of Farringdon Rd. The pub used to be known as the Coach and Horses and it sits in a strange depression where three roads meet: Ray St., Back Hill and Herbal Hill. You can usually hear running water coming from a grating in the middle of the road: it is the sound of The Fleet, the greatest of all London’s lost rivers, now subsumed within the Ministry of Works’ drains. The section where it runs beneath Ray St. is the only stretch where it maintains its original course from its headwaters in Hampstead all the way to the Thames, where it spits out below Blackfriars Bridge. The Victorian sewer sits 14 feet under Ray Street; when they were laying it they found traces of a Roman pavement and, underneath that, the petrified remains of a mill dam.

Supposedly, an earlier incarnation of the Coach and Horses afforded access to the Fleet from its cellars, providing Georgian fugitives with an escape route to the Thames, or certain death in a fetid sewer, whichever was more likely. This can’t be too easily dismissed as an urban legend, as the sinister house ‘of Jonathan Wild’ was a few yards south of here, and the cellar of that dive definitely connected to the filth of Fleet Ditch. But the Coach is interesting for other reasons, as it occupies the site of Hockley Hole (or Hockley-in-the-Hole), one of the most scabrous entertainment venues in London’s history.

‘Just here, where Back Hill and Ray Street meet, was Hockley Hole, a famous place of entertainment for bull and bear baiting, and other cruel sports that delighted the brutal taste of the eighteenth century. One of the proprietors, named Christopher Preston, fell into his own bear-pit, and was devoured, a form of sport that doubtless did not appeal to him.’ (The Fascination of London: Holborn and Bloomsbury by Sir Walter Besant,1903.)

Hockley Hole was famous for its bull terriers, which were bred and trained on the premises. In 1710 there was ‘… a match to be fought by two dogs, one from Newgate market, against one from Honey-lane market, at a bull … Likewise, a green bull to be baited, which was never baited before; and a bull to be turned loose with fireworks all over him. Also a mad ass to be baited. With a variety of bull-baiting and bear-baiting, and a dog to be drawn up with fireworks. To begin exactly at three of the clock.’ On match days, bulls and bears were paraded through the streets to promote the carnage; there’s even an account of a tiger being baited by six dogs, that was a premier attraction in 1715.

Hockley in the Hole was referenced by Ben Jonson and Henry Fielding, and also gets a mention in Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. It was swept away in 1756, after which bull-baiting moved to Spitalfields; but its memory lingered, an echo of a more primitive townscape. In Oliver Twist, Dickens has the Artful Dodger leading Oliver this way, en route to Fagin’s headquarters, which he placed a bit further south in Field Lane: ‘… down the little court by the side of the workhouse; across the classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley-in-the-Hole … the Dodger scudded at a rapid pace, directing Oliver to follow close at his heels’

In the late 1980s and early 90s this end of Clerkenwell was a media boiler room, outwardly nondescript but bristling with energy; churning yet hidden, like the Fleet. A district of studios and print shops and publishers and dilapidated warehouses hastily re-purposed as temporary art spaces. A sense of something exciting happening, even if you couldn’t quite work out what it was. Opposite The Coach and Horses is a massive Art Deco factory block that was then Holborn Studios, a vast, labyrinthine lair for photographers, designers and printers, with a drinking culture to match. And, in his art scene memoir Lucky Kunst (that’s a pun, in case you weren’t clear), gallerist Gregor Muir identifies an event at The Coach and Horses as a moment of coalescence for the scene associated with the YBAs. One night in 1992, after the opening of a show in a Farringdon warehouse curated by nascent impresario Jay Jopling, the art mob invaded this unfamiliar pub to celebrate. The mood turned sour when someone picked a fight with the Chapman brothers, Jake and Dinos, and a glass was broken over Dinos’s head. Muir asserts that, in the wake of this seemingly trivial pub fight, a new, collective spirit developed that dissolved pre-existing cliques and art world boundaries. ‘Something new was coming round the corner, something larger in scale’.

So: Georgian cruelty to YBA punch- up, bull baiting to Mother and Child Divided, etc., where does that get us, you ask? If I subscribed to the Ackroyd/Sinclair school of psychogeography, I might conclude with a paragraph devoted to the mysterious, subterranean forces of ‘the terrain’, throw in a mention of Guy Debord and generally risk getting kicked in the head. (A woman of my acquaintance recently observed that seeing ‘psychogeography’ listed under hobbies on a guy’s dating profile was the ultimate turn-off. Thus the term joins ‘spiritual’, ‘salsa’, ‘yoga’ and ‘angling’ as a romantic deal-breaker.) Instead, I leave you with this lovely portrait by the late John Londei. The subject is Clerkenwell mascot ‘Little Jimmy’, posing next to Holborn Studios in 1983. Jimmy was like a wizened Artful Dodger, a relic of old London amidst ‘80s media chancers. His uniqueness and his attitude – a kind of formal defiance – make the Dickens comparison inevitable. But I make no apology because this is one occasion where ‘Dickensian’ may be used with absolute conviction.