Christchurch Mayfair

I feel that I am a walking advert for a Kindle as I read War and Peace on the tube. The book that I have been reading since July was initially just heavy, then it got wet on our camping holiday, lost it's cover and grew flabby. Since then it has become increasingly battered alongside the junk in my bag - the notebooks, the toy guns, stray sweets, flat shoes, favourite lip gloss, child gloves, church leaflets, pta meeting announcements and now the spine has weakened and pages flutter loose. I carry it almost everywhere, a big heavy brick in my bag, just in case, just in case, there are a snatched five minutes to spare - too early for the library after dropping the boys off to school, sitting in the doctors surgery waiting for my name to be called, on the tube to work making the 15 minute journey ( that I kid myself to be only 10, shaving time in the morning to vacuum the flat, hang a load of washing out - finding myself late day after day, slightly sheepish but smiling as I arrive at my desk) and here sitting in a cafe ordering coffee and toast in a smart but 'artisan' cafe in Mayfair waiting for a church service to finish. I open the book, happy, almost exalted to be back in this other crystal sharp world. I have become someone who folds the pages rather than use a bookmark though with this wreck of a book it hardly matters - but I like the tiny increments of folded pages - the tick of time it has taken me to read it. I have always been a fast reader but this slow, increasingly loose paged read has become an almost physical relationship with the book - a passionate, time taken at any opportunity, absorbing thing.

This morning I have already done the dithering in a porch but the church looked packed and they were singing a hymm. I darted out and back down the narrow street. Behind me I heard the door open and the shuffle of someone coming out and looking both ways down the street, looking for whoever had just departed, as if I had played knock down ginger on God's door. Instinctively, I slink into the wall not wanting to be caught and there is a slight kink in the road so it is easy to remain undetected. I think I hear a small shrug and then the door closing.

The cafe is lovely, like being in San Franciso, as the smiley waitress takes my order and brings really good coffee. I am in Shepherd Market, a tucked away historic 'village' - like a toy model of some other time but with boutiques and lots of restaurants including a polish mexican restaurant (now there is a heady combination of seemingly physical opposites.) Corralled by the grand streets nearby this area has the dolls house charm and scaled down period details of narrow alleyways and old lamp posts. Though the toast takes ages and I feel agitated by having finished my coffee before it appears. A couple nearby read tabloid sunday newspapers but not the one I work for. I feel somehow cheated. I want to observe people turn the pages of the magazine and watch to see where their eye's rest. Instead I read 'War and Peace' and it is wonderful.


This whole area - Mayfair - but specifically the site this market was built on was the home of the annual fifteen day May Fairs set up in the 1680s by James II as a cattle market. The haunt of soldiers and women of loose morals it grew too rowdy, and was closed down in the 18th century:
The last Mayfair was remembered by Pennant as "covered with booths, temporary theatres, and every enticement to low pleasure."
Including a fashion for puppet beheading shows with the explanation, "After the Scottish rebellion of 1745," writes Chambers, in his "Book of Days," "the beheading of puppets formed one of the most regular and attractive parts of the exhibitions at the 'May Fair,' and was continued for several years.”

The May Fair, which had long been falling into disrepute, ceased to be held in the reign of George I. It was "presented by the grand jury of Middlesex for four years successively as a public scandal; and the county magistrates then presented an address to the Crown, praying for its suppression by royal proclamation." Its abolition was brought about mainly through the influence of the Earl of Coventry, to whose house in Piccadilly it was an annual nuisance.

Edward Shepherd was commissioned to develop the site and built the paved alleys, a duck pond and a two storey market topped with a theatre between 1735-46. A better clientele attended the entertainments here than the boisterous May Fairs - though the relationship between high money and sex seems to have kept the area's dubious reputation - indeed in the 1980s Jeffrey Archer's ( then the chairman of the conservative party) met with prostitute Monica Coghlan in a flat in Shepherd Market and the subsequent cover up led to his imprisonment.

I walk into the church. The service is finished but the church is packed and noisy - families with cradled, crawling, feeding, tottering, shouting, running tots like a Ahlberg children's book illustration, and exhausted but smiley looking parents drinking cups of tea. There is amplification and presentation equipment where the altar is, and the chairs laid out for the congregation are in an almost untidy arrangement. Though maybe it is just without the pews the layout seems to lack order and be almost too roomy for itself.

Alongside a pretty girl sidles close. Hello' she welcomes. 'I haven't seen you here before?'
I have just come to have a quick look at the church, I say, looking up at the huge stained glass windows.
She keeps talking, asking what would I like to find. I surprise myself by talking very truthfully. I say I just like visiting these spaces and thinking about history and belief and faith but that I don't have any. I imagine suddenly Rachel Whiteread's 'House' and the imprint of space filled with something, the space itself described by matter. I can see her 'inner' angler hold her expression steady as if watching the fish just nibbling the bait. We talk about the congregation and my surprise at how young everyone is. 'We are a group that came together and now we are blessed with all these children' - she waves her hands around as if surveying the many offspring of rabbits but with a slight wrinkling of her pretty nose to the din. We talk about the location of the church and she says it makes it easy to invite friends to come because they can go shopping afterwards. She says the church was an Ethopian church before, and now Church of England but evangelical. She does not leave my side as I go to look at leaflets by strange phone box style cupboards with big headings pinned above. 'Investigating Christianity' says one. She doesn't leave my side as I pick out a few leaflets but we shake hands and I thank her as I leave.

I find very little about the history of Christchuch, Down St. Errected in 1865 by F and H Francis as a subdivision of St George's of Hanover Square there seems to have been a fire at the beginning of the 20th century and the only other scrap of architectural information is that the multicoloured interior brick work was painted over in 1955. Apparently Mary, Princess Royal, daughter of George V worshipped here at the beginning of her married life. But that is all I find though I fish and fish and fish for history for hours.

I do discover details of nearby Keith's Chapel where clergyman Alexander Keith conducted clandestine ( with an element of secrecy to them: perhaps they took place away from a home parish, and without either banns or marriage licence and at any hour of the day or night) marriages and I wonder if I am onto something. Though there is no connection between the churches. He appears to be entreuperunarial in his marriage business placing adverts of great detail
Daily Post of July 20th, 1744:
"To prevent mistakes, the little new chapel in May Fair, near Hyde Park corner, is in the corner house, opposite to the city side of the great chapel, and within ten yards of it, and the minister and clerk live in the same corner house where the little chapel is; and the licence on a crown stamp, minister and clerk's fees, together with the certificate, amount to one guinea, as heretofore, at any hour till four in the afternoon. And that it may be the better known, there is a porch at the door like a country church porch."
While in prison, Keith seems to have had a keen eye to business. During his incarceration his wife died, and he kept her corpse embalmed and unburied for many months, but he used the unfortunate circumstances as a pr exercise - Daily Advertiser of January 30, 1750:—"We are informed that Mrs. Keith's corpse was removed from her husband's house in May Fair the middle of October last, to an apothecary's in South Audley Street, where she lies in a room hung with mourning, and is to continue there till Mr. Keith can attend the funeral. The way to Mr. Keith's chapel is through Piccadilly, by the end of St. James's Street, and down Clarges Street, and turn on the left hand." Then follows the announcement that the marriages are still carried on as usual by "another regular clergyman," as quoted above.
Some 60.000 marriages seemed to have taken place with neat and ordered records, so at a guinea a pop it must have been a lucrative trade.

Also while looking for details of Christchurch I find John Gay's 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London,' which appeared in 1716 - a poem in three books. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/encap/skilton/poetry/gay01a.html
It contains graphic and humorous descriptions of walking in the London of that period. Read the poem! But here to give an idea of the content is fragments from the index:
Alley, the pleasure of walking in one,
Barber, by whom to be shunned,
Butchers, to be avoided,
Cane, the convenience of one.
Coat, how to chuse one for the winter,
Countryman, perplexed to find the way,
Coachman, his whip dangerous,
Crowd parted by a coach,
Cellar, the misfortunes of falling into one.
Dustman, to whom offensive,
Fop, the ill consequence of passing too near one,
Father, the happiness of a child who knows his own,
Ladies dress neither by reason nor instinct,
Milkman of the city unlike a rural one.
Oyster, the courage of him that first ate one,
Periwigs, how stolen off the head,
Playhouse, a caution when you lead a lady out of it,
Shoes, what most proper for walkers.
Stockings, how to prevent their being spattered,
Schoolboys mischievous in frosty weather.
Umbrella, its use,
Wig, what to be worn in a mist,
Way, of whom to be inquired,


On my way to work - what I have been dreading happens - I turn the page 936 and find no 937 of War and Peace. At work, unexpectedly the owner of the paper I work for announces that he doesn't like the magazine. It is like a tantrum but it escalates and the work is taken off us, these people that have worked so hard, and we believed so well, and given to a special projects team. We wait days for news, as doors close for meetings around us but none comes. Coming up to Christmas it seems the wrong time to lose a job. What will I do I want to wail but I think oh something will have to turn up and what I want to do is write.
Relieved I find the missing page of the book in the flotsam of my bag and carry on reading.