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Less than twenty years ago the Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great, Smithfield, was partly occupied as a fringe factory, and in another corner was a blacksmith’s forge. St Bartholomew’s Close, which includes part of Cloth Fair, reflected the fallen state of the church, its ancient houses being mainly given up to poverty and shabby shops. The Earl of Warwick’s house, which still bears the Warwick arms, is let out in single apartments.
In the past decade affairs have improved a little in the Close, and many of the picturesque little features of the maze of courts and alleys are brightened with new paint, and flowers struggle up in window boxes and in tiny gardens fenced with green palings in the small stone-paved blind alleys.
In Cloth Fair Le Soeur, King Charles’s sculptor, lived, Milton hid for a space awaiting the Act of Oblivion, and Franklin tells in his journal of his life in lodgings here. The Cloth Fair is almost as old as the Priory Church. In Elizabethan times cattle and general merchandise took the place of cloth, and the fair spread into Smithfield (Thackeray’s ‘Smiffle’) beyond. At Bartlemy’s Fair the festival survived into the middle of last century.
The most interesting of the many old wood-and-plaster buildings in this quaint purlieu is the Dick Whittington tavern, which is said to be 500 years old and the oldest tavern in the City of London. It is almost certainly the oldest building occupied as a tavern, but its present licence cannot go back much beyond fifty years, for Shepherd has a print of it as a hairdresser’s shop, and there is an earlier print in the Grace Collection revealing it in the hands of a butcher. The building, however, is very quaint, and possesses features to rouse the curiosity of the antiquarian. The wooden bracket that supports the top storey is carved in a grotesque Gothic ornament that recalls the famous Star Inn at Alfriston in Sussex. The room on the street floor where the tavern business is conducted has an interior plaster dome, not of much antiquity, but very unusual.
The Dick Whittington and other interesting relics in Cloth Fair are now being threatened with destruction. Change at last is laying a hard finger on the old quarter, and surveyors are already busy at their doors taking measurements for a new thoroughfare from Long Lane through to Aldersgate-street.
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