THE LEATHERSELLERS
A SHORT HISTORY
05
IT WAS DESTROYED BY FIRE IN 1819, BUT NOT BEFORE THE ASSISTANT CLERK AND BEADLE HAD RISKED THEIR LIVES TO SALVAGE MANY OF THE COMPANY’S MOST VALUABLE POSSESSIONS.
The turbulence of the Tudor and Stuart era had a devastating effect on the fortunes of all Livery Companies, and the eighteenth century saw the Leathersellers’ Company at its lowest ebb. The increasingly elderly fabric of the Hall and the St Helen’s estate was a constant drain on already depleted resources, and membership levels were alarmingly low. Although the Company had obtained an Act of Common Council in 1778, obliging all trading leathersellers in the City to be members of the Leathersellers’ Company, it met with great resistance and efforts to enforce it were soon abandoned. In the last few decades of the century, the Company was nearly crippled by taxation, including the newly introduced income tax. There were desperate attempts to economise by cutting back on social events and even closing the Hall, but the Company was forced to conclude that only radical action would offer any hope of survival. The entire estate was cleared, and the great architect John Nash was commissioned to draw up plans for a grand square. The Company, however, eventually opted for an unknown pair of local developers, William and Thomas Roper, who began work in 1802 on a cul de sac of houses which became the first St Helen’s Place. In the meantime, the Company transferred operations to a former merchant’s house in the north east corner of the estate. An elegant building embellished with pilasters and topped with a weighty pediment,
the third Hall’s history was dramatically brief. It was destroyed by fire in 1819, but not before the assistant Clerk and Beadle had risked their lives to salvage many of the Company’s most valuable possessions. A fourth Hall, built on the same site to plans by William Fuller Pocock, was designed in a style only loosely based on the classical Greek model and had a façade dominated by a huge coade stone representation of the Company’s coat of arms. It opened in 1822 and, though sufficient for the Company’s needs at that time, was unkindly described by one observer as ‘incomparably the ugliest of civic edifices.’
Watercolour of the third Hall. Formerly a merchant’s house, it was used as the Company’s Hall from 1799 until its descruction by fire in 1819.
Rents from the new street began to come in from 1807 on, marking the beginning of the Company’s recovery. Indeed, the Company’s finances in the nineteenth century was underwritten by property, since rents in general were rising and the Company’s land holdings began to be developed as London grew. Areas such as Barnet, Lewisham and Sydenham, where the Company owned extensive estates, were lucratively transformed from predominantly rural places into built-up London suburbs. As a consequence of better financial circumstances, the Company’s social functions not only resumed but caused it to outgrow its modest
Hall, leading to a decision to build another spacious enough to accommodate the entire Court and Livery at dinner. The resulting fifth Hall, designed in a late Victorian version of the Jacobean style by the Company’s surveyor, G. Andrew Wilson, and opened in 1879. The centrepiece was a richly decorated banqueting hall, approached up a grand staircase lit by stained glass windows. The latest modern inventions were not scorned, however, and included electric lighting, using a Siemens dynamic machine – though this was not always reliable, requiring three men to operate and blowing half a dozen bulbs every time it was switched on; the system was removed in 1893.
The fourth Hall, completed in 1822 and used until 1878.
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