“the crossroads between time and eternity”
Peter Ackroyd
In between
Crossroads
Sanctuary
Refuge
Liminal
Threshold
Marginal
Rookery
Blackbirds
Billy Waters
Little Ireland
The Holy Land
Last drink
Oasis
Resurrection Gate
Centrepoint
Homeless
Healing
Death and rebirth
Water
Marsh
Moon over the water
Phoenix
“The invocation of sorrow and loneliness, first embodied in the twelfth-century foundation, has never entirely left this area; throughout its history it has been the haunt of the poor and the outcast. Vagrants even now roam its streets and close to the church there is still a centre for the homeless.”
– London The Biography. by Peter Ackroyd
After the Restoration, the area was populated by Huguenot refugees who had fled persecution and established themselves as tradesmen and artisans, particularly in weaving and the silk trade.[2]
Convicted criminals were often allowed, in tradition, to stop at St Giles en route to Tyburn for a final drink – a “St Giles Bowl” – before hanging.
William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson, and Gustave Doré, among others, drew the area, as did novelists Henry Fielding and Charles Dickens. Romance novelists Elizabeth Hoyt and Erica Monroe wrote about it extensively in their Maiden Lane and Rookery Rogues series, respectively.[8] Peter Ackroyd writes “The Rookeries embodied the worst living conditions in all of London’s history; this was the lowest point which human beings could reach”.
Charing Cross Road – built 1887, and named as it led to the cross at Charing, from the Old English word “cierring”, referring to a bend in the River Thames[22][23][24]
Phoenix Street – named after an inn that formerly stood near here
Derek Jarman lived above the Phoenix Theatre
St Giles was an 8th-century hermit in Provence who was crippled in a hunting accident and later became patron saint of cripples and lepers. Circus is a British term for a road junction, with several roads meeting and a central reservation or ’roundabout, the traffic passing in a one way system around the roundabout or ‘circus’
Four Times of the Day
Hogarth’s “Noon” from Four Times of the Day, showing St Giles church in the background
Gin Lane by William Hogarth (1751)
The etching “Noon” from Four Times of the Day by Hogarth takes place in Hog Lane, with the church of St Giles in the Fields in the background. Hogarth would feature St Giles again as the background of Gin Lane and First Stage of Cruelty.
Upon this site in the first years of the twelfth century, were established a chapel and a hospital for lepers; they were dedicated to St. Giles, himself the patron saint of lepers. The establishments lay among fields and marshes, their contagion kept apart from the city. But St. Giles was also the intercessionary saint for beggars and cripples, for those afflicted with misery or those consigned to loneliness. He himself was lame, but refused to be treated for his disability in order that he might practice self-mortification all the more fervently.
London The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
https://www.stgilesonline.org/history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Giles,_London
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