Blackfriars Road

This is a Magic lantern Slide showing the corner of Blackfriars Road and Union Street, at 196 Blackfriars Road are the premises of J.W. Cunningham & Co, a long-established Ironmongers. On the opposite corner is the Surrey Chapel built by The Rev. Rowland Hill in 1783 in the form of an octagon, he stated that he built it this way so that the devil could not hide in the corners. The Ironmongers of J.W. Cunningham & Co was the third Ironmongery business at the premises, the first was run by a man name Walker, the second by a man named Hayward and the sign of the Dog and Pot or Dog and Porringer appears to have been attached to the premises since the late 18th Century. In 1824 a twelve-year-old Charles Dickens walked passed this corner daily on his way to and from his job at Warrens Blacking Factory at Hungerford Stairs on the Thames by Charing Cross and his lodgings in Lant Street. He recounted his recollections to his friend and executor John Forster, and they were published in the first biography of Dickens by Forster in 1872, two years after Dickens death. “My usual way home was over Blackfriars Bridge, and down that turning in the Blackfriars Road which has Rowland Hill's chapel on one side, and the likeness of a golden dog licking a golden pot over a shop-door on the other. There are a good many little low-browed old shops in that street, of a wretched kind; and some are unchanged now. I looked into one a few weeks ago, where I used to buy boot-laces on Saturday nights, and saw the corner where I once sat down on a stool to have a pair of ready-made half-boots fitted on. I have been seduced more than once, in that street on a Saturday night, by a show-van at a corner; and have gone in, with a very motley assemblage, to see the Fat-pig, the Wild-Indian, and the Little-lady. There were two or three hat-manufactories there then (I think they are there still); and among the things which, encountered anywhere or under any circumstances, will instantly recall that time, is the smell of hat-making.” In the early 1870s the ground lease of the Surrey Chapel was coming up for renewal but a legal technicality reverted the ownership of the lease to the original owner and the Surrey Chapel moved to a purpose built new church in Westminster Bridge Road, about a mile away. The Surrey Chapel was used for a short time by a group of primitive Methodists until 1881 when the building was leased for 21 years to Thomas Green & Son who produced gardening tools which included rollers and lawn mowers. In 1910 the Surrey Chapel was leased by Dick and Bella Burge; Dick had been quite a successful boxer until he was imprisoned in 1902 for ten years in connection with a bank fraud. The building then became known as “The Ring” and was the venue for boxing matches and later for wrestling bouts. Dick died in 1918 from pneumonia and his wife Bella then ran the venue very successfully until the building was hit by a German bomb in 1940 and then completely destroyed by another in 1941. The Ironmongers survived the war, but it did not survive Southwark Council which decided to demolish the building along with others to create Nelson Square Gardens Estate. A large office block called Palestra House now stands on the site of the Surrey Chapel and on the opposite corner an old lamp post supports a facsimile of the Dog and Pot, the actual sign is now in the Cuming Museum although in the same year as the facsimile was erected on the 201st birthday of Charles Dickens in 2013, there was a fire at the Museum which damaged the sign. There is also a facsimile of a metal coal hole cover adjacent to the Lamp Post showing the Dog and Pot sign and the name of J.W. Cunningham & Co, it would appear that the company had a foundry close by in Great Suffolk Street where it manufactured the coal hole covers and retailed them from the shop. I think the photograph dates from just after the first world war, you can just make out a Boxing poster on the wall of the Ring.

Done