“Dirty Rotten Sheds”: Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London
Elaine Tierney
Eighteenth-Century Studies, Volume 50, Number 2, Winter 2017, pp. 231-252
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Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 231
“DIRTY ROTTEN SHEDS”:
EXPLORING THE EPHEMERAL CITY
IN EARLY MODERN LONDON
Elaine Tierney
INTRODUCTION: “BEDS IN SHEDS” IN 2015 AND 1666
In September 2015 Joe Peduzzi answered an advertisement on SpareRoom.com
to view a room in Bethnal Green in East London. Peduzzi was new to the city, having
moved from the Isle of Wight to start a new job. A photograph of the flat shows
what appears to be a fairly ordinary communal living space, equipped with a sofa,
a chair, some tables, and shelves. But tucked away behind the other furniture was
a less expected addition: a small freestanding structure with its own roof, walls,
and windows, painted white to fade into the background. This structure was a
garden shed.1 “Beds in sheds”—to borrow the formulation beloved by outraged
journalists—are one of the more picturesque additions to London’s early twenty-
first-century housing crisis. No longer merely places to store old plant pots and
bikes, these sheds offer a material commentary on life in the contemporary global
city, acting as a convenient figure for wider social, cultural, political, and economic
issues: from the new lows plumbed in the rental market to the unchecked activities
of self-interested landlords and the challenges faced by young people, scrabbling
to get some kind of foothold in the city.
The Great Fire of London in 1666 also resulted in a housing crisis, when
around thirteen thousand houses were destroyed in both the city proper and the
extramural areas just to the west.2 One strategy for contending with the dispersal of
people was the temporary structures dotted around the city at Moorfields, Finsbury
Elaine Tierney is part of the V&A Research Institute (VARI). Before this, she was lecturer in
early modern history at the University of Manchester. She has a special interest in the temporary
built environment, with forthcoming publications exploring festival design and early modern
scaffolding.
© 2017 by the ASECS Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (2017) Pp. 231–52.
232 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
Fields, Highgate, and Islington to the north, and St George’s Fields in Southwark to
the south.3 Some of these “miserable huts and hovels” were intended as short-term
crisis management, providing emergency shelter for those who had been burned out
of their homes.4 Not all were rudimentary: in April 1667 Samuel Pepys remarked
upon structures at Moorfields that were two stories high.5
Some structures built as disaster relief were still in place decades after the
fire. The Court of Aldermen ordered the demolition of all sheds on Moorfield in
1674, issuing an even more sweeping directive the following year.6 The story of
Thomas Catchmead, fishmonger, was even more remarkable. Burned out of his
premises in Fish Lane in the city, he temporarily relocated to a “shed adjoining
the Conduit near the Maypole in the Strand, which does not take up two yards of
ground in width of the street,” encouraged by a royal proclamation that invited
“persons trading in provisions to sell their commodities in all convenient places in
and about the city.”7 Catchmead was still at this location five years later.8 A series
of petitions from the fishmonger and his close kin to three successive monarchs
offer snapshots of how this structure fit into its immediate environment. In 1671
it was contested: “a neighbour of the same trade threatens to fire the said shed.”9
With the good opinion of twenty-six neighbors, Catchmead argued that “the shed
was no annoyance or offence to anyone,” and received a royal warrant to continue
living there.10 By January 1672 the dispute had escalated, climaxing dramatically
when Catchmead’s shed was “riotously pulled down . . . by John Tall and others,
who spoke contemptuously of his Majesty when the warrant for its erection was
shown them.”11 By 1686, it was his widow, Sarah, “left in a mean condition,” who
successfully petitioned James II “for a like warrant for her continuance” in the
rebuilt shed.12 At the turn of the century, another generation of Catchmeads, his
granddaughters, sought permission from William III to remain in place.13
What does this single shed tell us about London at the turn of the eigh-
teenth century? Quite simply, its presence is at odds with the version of the city
found in scholarly accounts, where London is presented as the first truly “modern”
city, a characterization underpinned by the appearance of its built environment.
Catchmead’s Strand was far removed from the vision of the New Exchange in John
Harris’s 1715 print [figure 1], a building that was also on the Strand. One of late
seventeenth-century London’s most luxurious retail spaces, the New Exchange
was built to last in “the modern Classical style.”14 In reflecting this, Harris’s print
promotes a familiar vision of London’s emerging early modernity as commercial,
Classical, and rational.
Reintroducing less temporally stable elements, whether sheds or “beds-in-
sheds,” suggests something else, and subtly inflects what is meant by “modern.”
First, this approach acknowledges a much broader spectrum of the built environ-
ment. Second, and relatedly, this shift highlights the very different ways of being
modern that can coexist. Recent work on twenty-first-century slums brings these
ideas into focus by complicating how we understand the impacts of urbanization
and modernity on the built environment. Rather than envisage this process solely
in terms of continual, often obliterative, change, this work embraces the broader
materiality of the contemporary city, to address less durable materials, like straw
and recycled timber, alongside steel and glass.15 Particularly useful are studies
dealing with the tricky issue of who and, indeed, what gets to stay put, as in Liza
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 233
Figure 1. John Harris, The New Exchange. Etching and engraving on paper. Trustees of the British
Museum, 1880, 1113.2836.
Weinstein’s analysis of Dharavi, Mumbai’s largest slum. From the perspective of
neoliberal global capital, it makes no rational sense that “some of the most valuable
land” in the city continues to be settled by its poorest inhabitants. Weinstein explains
this contradiction by scrutinizing how local factors like bureaucracy complicate,
even stall, macro social, political, and economic developments.16 This approach,
embracing the top-down and grassroots, teases out the gradual, often overlapping
nature of change within urban built environments, as well as “the actually existing
durabilities and the solidity of structures that refuse to melt.”17
London in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not the same
as Mumbai at the beginning of the twenty-first, but its built environment offered
up similar contradictions, such as those posed by Catchmead’s shed. It endured
for forty years in a city that placed increasing value on building that was middle-
class, commercial, planned, and permanent, and where even the monumental New
Exchange was demolished in 1737, superseded by the fashionable West End.18 The
changing face of the Strand highlights how the urban built environment was—and
continues to be—a work in progress, where the lifecycles of individual components
were staggered and often overlapped in the short, medium, and longer term. Take
another local landmark, the hundred-foot wooden maypole, which was erected
in 1661.19 The maypole became synonymous with its surroundings, even appear-
ing on tokens issued by local tradesmen, and remained next to the conduit until
1713, when it was moved to a location in front of Somerset House to make way
for the construction of St. Mary-le-Strand. That it remained in this new location
until 1718 shows that only within early modern London’s longer history could it
be regarded as a less enduring landmark.
234 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
At the crux of this investigation is the relationship between the temporary
and the permanent in the built environment, historically and in the work of scholars.
The discussion seeks to engage both arenas. First, it examines how scholars and
early moderns engaged with ideas about the temporary and permanent in relation to
London’s built environment in the decades after the Great Fire. Second, it establishes
the social, spatial, and structural dimensions of the early modern shed. Third, and
finally, it demonstrates that structures like sheds introduce a useful complication
to how we understand the early modern built environment and, by extension, late
seventeenth-century London’s nascent modernity. Notably, Catchmead and Pe-
duzzi’s sheds caused anxiety. This was explicitly tied to perceptions of use or, more
correctly, misuse: while small-scale, self-enclosed, comparatively flimsy structures
were appropriate as storage, they were beyond the pale as permanent shelter. The
final part of the discussion uses the multifunctionality of sheds to interrogate the
ambivalence early moderns felt about sheds and, in doing so, to recalibrate the
meanings generated by London’s urban fabric.
LOCATING LONDON’S BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Early modern London’s built environment has been restored to view by
waves of historians, art historians, architectural historians, and geographers.20 Even
with the breadth and scope of this scholarship, some structures have been filtered
out: additions that can be defined as temporary, provisional, or semipermanent. An
introduction to a collection of essays about late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
construction materials even begins by stating, “After the Great Fire, London was
rebuilt as a city of brick and stone.”21 Arguably, less durable entities challenge one
of the enduring narratives about the city: its emergence as the first truly “mod-
ern” city in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Pursuing this trajectory has
resulted in an emphasis on durable materials and new types of spatial formation
within the built environment. The increasing use and fashionability of brick, ashlar
stone, tile, and slate have been used to trace an aesthetic shift toward the rational
“Classicism” redolent of Georgian architecture in the popular imagination.22 The
spatial deportment of some parts of eighteenth-century London—its squares and
wider streets, suitable for genteel promenading—have been interpreted as open,
public, “front-stage” spaces, to borrow Erving Goffman’s terminology, which
transformed behavior, creating enhanced opportunities for polite sociability.23 This
sense of Enlightenment reason and order is present, too, in accounts of mapping
and representing urban space.24
There are honorable exceptions. Miles Ogborn has convincingly argued
for eighteenth-century London’s multiple modernities, while Elizabeth McKellar
and Peter Guillery have usefully complicated the line between temporary and
permanent in its built environment. By shifting focus to the city’s rich array of
“vernacular” architectural forms, some of which are still in situ, McKellar and
Guillery reveal a parallel story of artisanal housing that flouted successive waves
of building codes, being predominantly in timber, and that complicates the story
of “big builders” by teasing out the extent to which, even in late early modernity,
London was constructed through piecemeal, often small-scale speculation. As
Guillery argues, “That such buildings existed in eighteenth-century London says
something about the first ‘great’ modern city, something either previously unknown
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 235
or assumed to be true without adequate exploration. . . . This both colours and
complicates understandings of London’s modernity.”25 Within this fast-changing,
fluid urban landscape—what Ogborn has termed the “fractured and heterogeneous
city”—even brick buildings were erected on the understanding that they might not
last: the typical lease at the beginning of the seventeenth century was thirty-one
years, increasing to sixty-six by its end.26 What follows builds on this work by
reintroducing even more temporally unstable structures.
Where scholars do engage with temporary structures, these tend to be
special cases. First, historians of art, architecture, and literature have explicated the
most elaborate scenic devices created for royal and civic celebrations.27 Notably,
while spectacular occasional architecture has an expansive scholarly literature, other
structures devised for public celebrations, such as large-format, structural bonfires
and temporary viewing platforms, have received little attention.28 Second, social
and cultural histories have attended, often in passing, to the apparatus of judicial
punishment, most notably “the Triple Tree” at Tyburn.29 Third, recent studies of
retail examine the “physical infrastructure” of shopping, including the provisional
structures used at markets and fairs and by street traders.30 Fourth, and finally,
architectural historians and literary scholars have explored the conceptual limits
of the ephemeral city through the lens of print. Here, the emphasis is not on those
additions to the early modern city that were less materially enduring, but on the
practice of representing architectural forms, topography, and urban space.31
And yet, “ephemeral London” is amply documented in the historical
record. While a comprehensive survey of this material is beyond the scope of the
present discussion, there exists a rich seam of textual, visual, and material evi-
dence regarding less durable structures, from sheds, scaffolds, and stalls, through
booths, platforms, and penthouses, to rails, fences, and, on occasion, military
encampments. Notably, most items that might be included in the “ephemeral city”
did not constitute architecture in the early modern sense of the word, which has,
perhaps, led to their omission from some scholarly accounts. Not yet a distinct
profession, architecture from the fifteenth century onward was closely associated
with mathematical and abstract qualities, putting increasing distance between it
and the hands-on practices of building.32 Largely untapped evidence casts doubt
on any broad shift from temporary to permanent, recalibrating the social, politi-
cal, and economic values extrapolated from the built environment. Even within
the “ephemeral city,” structures varied considerably. They embodied a variety of
temporalities, from a few hours to semipermanence, were located in a range of
spaces, and were the endpoints of different levels of design and skill. In spite of
these differences, this stratum of the built environment was distinguished by fluid
interactions between location, materials and construction, and timeframe, when
contrasted with the greater commitment demanded by immured, embedded, and
monumental additions to the urban landscape.
FROM STICKS TO MARBLE: PERMANENCE AND
PROGRESS IN EARLY MODERN LONDON
Evidence of attitudes to the built environment suggests that the “tempo-
rary,” as a material and structural category, came to have pejorative associations
in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. While less durable structures were
236 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
appropriate in specific circumstances, like civic and royal celebrations, other dis-
courses around the built environment, such as building regulations and treatises,
intimate that permanence and progress were increasingly perceived as intertwined.
Suggestively, Emperor Augustus’s claim that he found in Rome a city of bricks
but left one of marble resonated with early modern Londoners. In 1615 James I’s
Proclamation for Buildings deployed the motif, drawing attention to the social and
aesthetic benefits that arose from durable construction:
Wee whom God hath honoured to be the first King of Great Britaine,
might be able to say in some proportion, That Wee had found our Citie
and Suburbs of London of Sticks, and left them of Bricks being a Meteri-
all farre more durable, safe from fire, beautiful and magnificent.33
Like Augustus’s Rome, London would become an enduring monument to its ruler.34
This link, between built environment and royal reputation, was a feature, too, of
variations on the same theme later in the century. In 1661, in a treatise commis-
sioned by Charles II, John Evelyn envisaged London’s radical redevelopment. His
city would also be resplendent in its permanence and monumentality: “That this
Glorious and Antient City, which from Wood might be rendered Brick, and (like
another Rome) from Brick made Stone and Marble.”35 In the aftermath of the Great
Fire in 1666, Captain George Cock imagined an even greater challenge, musing in
a letter to his friend Williamson that he hoped the King, “after many years, may
say of London as Augustus did of Rome, that he found it built of earth, but left
it of marble.”36
From the mid-sixteenth century onward, London’s building regulations
sought to make this transformation a reality through increasingly stringent direc-
tives, some of which were effected through Acts of Parliament, in a chronology
dealt with elsewhere.37 What matters here is the aspiration of these codes, and
the links made between materials, temporalities, and spaces. As Derek Keene has
noted, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century proclamations on “the style
and materials of building were part of a larger concern for ordering the capital, on
the one hand to contain its physical growth and on the other to promote buildings
and public spaces that were dignified and ornamental.”38 Post-Great Fire codes, in
addition to reiterating a shift in building materials from flammable timber to brick,
“introduced to England the rational notion that ordinary domestic architecture
might be controlled via stratification” into four standard categories or “sorts” of
houses.39 Significantly, much of this regulatory activity focused on facades and the
building line—those aspects of buildings that impacted comparatively public places.
Much less was said about the use of London’s less accessible spaces, its courtyards
and yards, or its hinterlands, recently restored to view by McKellar’s magisterial
study of early modern suburbs.40
Commentators also reflected on the wider consequences of building: its role
in bringing social, commercial, and reputational benefits to cities. Unsurprisingly,
Nicholas Barbon, late seventeenth-century London’s most energetic speculative
builder, was keen to make a persuasive case for the benefits of his profession in
response to contemporary concerns about unchecked development.41 In An Apology
for the Builder (1685), civic pride and active enhancement of the built environment
were inextricably linked:
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 237
The Artists of this Age have already made the City of London the Me-
tropolis of Europe, and if it be compared for the number of good Houses,
for its many and large Piazzas, for its richness of Inhabitants, it must be
allowed the largest, best built, and richest City in the world.42
The concept of “good” building was tied into debates about how best to achieve
material improvement. For Sir Christopher Wren “Materials for Publick fabrics”
mattered.43 Cities should be built properly: formally planned, sturdy, durable, and
enduring. Wren’s concept of urban improvement fixated on the durability of avail-
able resources, specifically bricks. Speed and quantity were offered as measures of
quality or, more pointedly, its absence. The “mighty Demand for the hasty Works
of thousands of Houses at once” led to a decline in quality, as “the Brick-makers
spoil the Earth in the mixing and hasty burning, till the Bricks will hardly bear
Weight.” Wren’s plea finished with a revealing half-echo of Augustus: “The Earth
about London, rightly managed, will yield as good Brick as were the Roman Bricks
(which I have often found in the old Ruins of the City).”44
Here, ambivalence about London’s urban development was magnified
by the critical relationship identified in this article, between timing and materials.
The temporary was framed not only as less durable, but as too swiftly created,
meaning that even brick could lack solidity and integrity in a city that expanded
for the benefit of speculators motivated solely by profit. Wren’s comments were
no less self-motivated than Barbon’s and should be taken with a substantial grain
of salt. Nevertheless, his reflections on brick were also more than rhetorical effect.
London stock bricks, developed in the aftermath of the Fire, mixed London Clay
with “what has been variously known as Spanish, soil, town ash, or rough stuff.”45
While later commentators have remarked on the enhanced durability of the London
stock brick, some eighteenth-century contemporaries were unconvinced, worrying
that any old rubbish was added to the mix, including “the Slop and Drift of the
Streets.”46
From another perspective, transformation of the built environment was
presented as a spur to commercial activity. Barbon’s vision of London made spa-
tial and professional specialization integral to an expanding commercial center.
While shelter could be framed as basic, animalistic even (“If we examine man
in his Natural condition without Arts, his Tenement differs little from the rest
of Nature’s Herd . . .”), the ability of a society to make and consume goods and
services beyond fundamental need was a marker of wealth and advancement. In
Barbon’s view, “When Mankind is civilised, instructed with Arts, and under good
Government, every man doth not dress his own Meat, make his own Clothes,
nor build his own house.”47 Here, then, Barbon proposed a model for enhanced
productivity that was underpinned by division of labor, a model that necessitated
increasingly specialized spaces.
Lacking permanence and monumentality, constructed from the “wrong”
sorts of materials, and often tucked away in the city’s less accessible “back-stage”
spaces, its yards, courtyards, and smaller gardens, sheds sit awkwardly within
“polite” early modern London. This was evident in Nicholas Hawksmoor’s 1715
letter to George Clarke, which coursed with frustration, as the architect railed
against lost opportunities to overhaul London in the years after the Great Fire:
238 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
One might have expected some good when ye Phoenix was to rise again,
vizt. A convenient regular well built Citty, excellent, skilful, honest Arti-
ficiers made by ye greatness & Quality of ye worke in rebuilding such a
Capital. but instead of these, we have noe city, nor Streets, nor Houses,
but a Chaos of Dirty Rotten Sheds, allways Tumbling or takeing fire,
with winding Crooked passages (Scarse practicable) Lakes of Mud and
Rills of Stinking Mire running through them.48
This was the Augustinian transformation in reverse: a city running backwards,
where the dream of an orderly, rational, well-built London was starkly opposed with
the visceral unpleasantness of the built environment’s actual and unruly plasticity:
here was a city not just of marble, but also of mire, mud, and “Dirty Rotten Sheds.”
DEFINING SHEDS IN EARLY MODERN LONDON
The Oxford English Dictionary definition of a shed as a slight, often
small structure, built primarily for storage or as a workshop, and often attached,
sometimes literally, to another, more permanent structure dates to at least the
mid-fifteenth century.49 Broadly speaking, this description offers a good work-
ing definition. Unlike Augustus’s “city of marble”—or, indeed, that of James I or
Charles II—sheds were not defined as enduring. Instead, they could be erected and
dismantled comparatively quickly, as was implicit in the appearance of temporary
dwellings on the outskirts of London in the weeks after the Great Fire. Some sheds
seem to have been prefabricated, permitting their speedy construction, deconstruc-
tion, and storage elsewhere. Later in the eighteenth century, a mountebank used
portability to bargain for permission to continue trading from Covent Garden,
promising that his shed “shall always be taken down so soon as he has done his
business, and put into a Cellar.”50
Swiftness of construction was tied to materials, with most sheds built in
timber and deal boards (boards of fir or pine cut to a regular size).51 Orders to
Wren stipulated that one particular shed be built of “boards very strong.” This
durability reflected its intended use: to provide shelter and some degree of comfort
for James II and Mary of Modena as they watched the fireworks to celebrate their
coronation in April 1685.52 Newspaper reports of fire also drew attention to the
especial flammability of sheds.53 Those sheds that can be attributed to a specific
organization, such as those erected by the London Livery Companies and the
Ordnance and Navy Offices, were built by carpenters, assisted by larger groups
of laborers. The Merchant Taylors’ Company spent £48 10s on “500 large deals
to make sheds” and £20 10s for the carpenters’ work in 1667. On this occasion
the sheds were intended as a temporary stand-in for the Company’s guildhall, still
in ruins after the Fire the previous year.54 Some better-built sheds also had tiled
roofs, with contemporary advice favoring the addition of curved “pantiles” to
prevent the pooling of rainwater on flat roofs.55 Accused of theft in June 1722,
Joseph Middleton was observed to knock five tiles off the roof of John de Puis’s
shed when attempting to make his getaway.56
The most important criteria in defining early modern sheds were their
relationships to other, often more durable buildings. Plans and leases show how
sheds were contextualized by contemporaries.57 Newspaper advertisements give
an even clearer sense of how sheds functioned as supplementary structures. In one
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 239
example from 1722, Mr. Andrews, a tanner based in Grange Yard, Southwark,
offered a specialized built environment for rent, encompassing “a Smoak house,
Beam-house, large drying Shed and Bark-Barn, and a Stable, large Dwelling-house,
and a Leather-house.”58 Sheds also redressed the failings of other buildings. When
designing a parsonage at Bloomsbury in 1727, Hawksmoor proposed the addition
of a small shed to “be built for a wash-house” to make up for the kitchen and
cellars being “dark and small.”59
Legally, sheds were included in the leases of more expansive properties:
outbuildings adjacent to, or in the vicinity of, a main building were deemed part
of the “dwelling house” and, as such, were subject to the more serious crimes of
arson, breaking and entering, and burglary.60 When Jesse Walden was accused of
burgling Thomas Law in Whitechapel in 1742, he did not deny the charge, but was
emphatic that “it was only a Shed he broke into and not a Dwelling-House,” in an
attempt to reduce the seriousness of his offence.61 The status of “dwelling house”
was not necessarily conferred by habitation in the case of temporary structures:
both Matthew Hale and William Blackstone concurred that booths and tents could
not be burgled “in a market or fair; though the owner lodge therein.”62 Quibbling
over terminology could work the other way. Earlier in the seventeenth century,
William Portington sought to save from demolition the tenement he owned on
Long Acre by arguing that the structure was no shed: while “a shed is a leaning to
something to bear up the roof . . . this roof bears itself, and at its first erecting as
a tenement it was built for one, and has long continued without enlargement.”63
This last example demonstrates how defining early modern sheds was more
than semantics: location and spatiality mattered too. Contemporary and scholarly
attention lavished on the built environment does not concern the location of sheds.
Most were located away from London’s “front-stage” areas, in gardens, yards, and
courtyards. Textual descriptions indicate the orientation of less durable structures
within these spaces. In 1736 George Walker made a delivery of smuggled tea to
the “back Shed of The George, near Shoreditch-Church,” while Richard Mason
was invited to drink “a Pint of Home-brew’d” in the Adam and Eve’s “back-shed,”
close by St Pancras Churchyard, indicating the possibility of a “front-shed.”64 It was
when sheds became visible that they were problematic—by being positioned in the
“open” street, as with Catchmead’s shed, or by becoming an active nuisance.65 In
1725 the Duchess of Marlborough was frustrated by temporary things, when the
passage into Marlborough Hall, off Pall Mall, became a battleground between the
Duchess and her neighbors. “Several sheds,” cellars, and benches had “encroached
eight feet into the breadth of the way to her house.”66
Thinking spatially and reading between the lines of textual sources, descrip-
tions of dropping or throwing become especially useful, revealing just how close
sheds were to other buildings. Mary Vezey’s desperate escape from a Stepney garret,
where she seems to have been her husband’s prisoner, involved dropping from a
window and “down upon an old Shed, and so to the Ground.”67 Similarly, Samuel
Cook’s witness statement in Elizabeth Ambrook’s trial for infanticide evokes the
layered temporality, materiality, and ownership that shaped London’s urban fabric,
calling to mind Samuel Hieronymus Grimm’s drawing of cottages at Barnes [figure
2]. From his vantage point, “my Garden-Door in Crown-Alley in upper Moorfields,”
he remarked on hearing, first, a window open, before something was thrown out.
240 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
On further investigation, he “saw something lye upon Mr Clark’s Shed which joins
to William Ambrook’s House”: it was a newborn baby.68 In this instance, dropping
was intended as a concealed act in the relative seclusion of an alley.
Structural relationships between sheds and other types of building were
articulated by disputes between neighbors, and between householders and local
law enforcement. In a notably testy encounter from 1706, the Duke of Somerset
complained about a shed that had appeared outside his garden, causing damage
to his “trees, wall, garden &c.” Somerset was exasperated by the shed’s builder:
“This unfair dealing and egregious trifling would make any man but Sir Chris-
topher Wren blush.”69 Anne Bacon, a widow and tenant in the Old Palace Yard
at Whitehall, complained about a temporary structure that stayed put. Built for
the convenience of the royal family during the coronation in 1715, the shed was
still in place nearly two years later to the inconvenience of Bacon, who pleaded
that it “very much darkens that side of her house and deprives her of the benefit
of said Yard.”70 Contested boundaries also highlighted the sensorial challenges
of building—and living—in cities. When German Lutherans at the Savoy Chapel
sought a suitably contemplative environment, they petitioned for the removal of
a shed used as a brew house, which had caused disturbance “to the performance
of divine service.”71
Proximity could be problematic in other ways. Housebreakers and burglars
took advantage of the location of sheds to gain access to adjoining or adjacent
buildings, reinforcing the extent to which these structures were liminal, creating
“weak spots” between inside and outside, private and public. Awoken by burglars
in 1712, Jonathan Swift discovered that “the rogues had lifted up the sash a yard”
before being interrupted. Their point of entry was easy to spot: “There are great
sheds before my windows, although my lodgings be a storey high; and if they get
upon the sheds they are almost even with my window.”72 Similarly, John Barns was
accused of getting onto the shed of Samuel Catland in the dead of night, and from
this vantage point using “a Chissel and Iron Crow” to force a window and get into
the house.73 Under questioning, the burglar John Maxworth identified another weak
spot, explaining how he had “got on a Shed in Cotton’s Ground, adjoining to the
Coal House of Mr. Blackerby,” and from there into the latter’s yard and, eventually,
his house.74 When the highwayman “Philips, alias Clark, alias Matthews” sought
to escape from Newgate Prison in the summer of 1735, he staked his chances on
a shed belonging to Mr. James, which was just under the window of the jail, and
in the relative seclusion of a yard off Giltspur Street.75
SHEDS IN ACTION: USES AND ABUSES
Less durable structures like sheds brought instability into the early mod-
ern built environment. This functioned at the level of materials and construction
techniques, but it also related to the social, political, and economic meanings
embedded in such provisional structures. It was the fluidity and, in particular, the
multifunctionality of sheds that made them most problematic for early modern
Londoners. Although there were four broad categories of use—storage, produc-
tion, consumption, and shelter—these were not always clearly demarcated, and the
evidence suggests that single structures could be put to more than one use concur-
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 241
Figure 2. Samuel Hieronymous Grimm, Man Sketching at Barnes, 1760s/70s. Drawing on paper. Trustees
of the British Museum, 1919, 0712.1–97.
rently, or repurposed during their lifecycle, briefly or on a more permanent basis.
Significantly, not all uses were considered equal. Storage, particularly of wholesale
goods or government property, was largely perceived as decent and seemly; in
these instances, spatially and legally, less durable structures were explicitly linked
to dwellings or places of business.76 By contrast, other applications were much
more contentious, including the use of sheds for unregulated making, disorderly
sociability, and, above all, shelter.
The fluid potential of sheds could have positive and negative connota-
tions. On the one hand, sheds were responsive structures, which could be built
from scratch and adapted or repurposed to meet new needs with comparative ease
and speed. In terms of the skills and materials discussed above, the “barriers to
entry” in constructing or adapting a shed could be lower than for, say, devising
and constructing a brick dwelling house. On the other hand, and for much the
same reasons, sheds could be seen to afford too much agency. Speed of construc-
tion, access to materials, and skill made some sheds tricky to regulate. In the open
street, sheds acted as a kind of encroachment: a building type that appeared in a
piecemeal fashion, gradually and almost imperceptibly to “colonize” urban space.
The wording of a warrant issued by the Treasury during building work at Hampton
Court is revealing: its suggestive run of words called for the demolition of “all sheds,
nuisances and encroachments.”77 As in twenty-first-century Mumbai, some sheds
addressed the needs of those who were unable to participate in formal markets.
One such example was the insalubrious home of John and Elizabeth Clay, which
242 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
was described as a “Shed, or Lodging,” but was also used on an informal basis
as a gin shop.78 Like slums, these improvised dwellings were “off the grid,” lack-
ing access to the sewage and drainage systems that were part of newer residential
developments.79
Barbon’s remarks about building and trade are useful for understanding
distinctive social and economic attitudes to sheds.80 Within his framework, the broad
category of storage sheds could be seen as actively contributing to an economy of
“wants” by furnishing a place to make, store, and sell the exponentially “expanding
world of goods” scholars have located in the British Isles in the late seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.81 By contrast, sheds for shelter had a very different set of
connotations, veering perilously close to “man in his Natural condition without
Arts,” where there was little to differentiate unskilled tenements “from the rest of
Natures Herd.”82 In doing so, they disclosed the dark side of early modern urban-
ization, illuminating the transitory zero-sum existences of people barely scraping
by, and the informal, provisional, and precarious dimensions of early modern city
life.83 It is not too much of a stretch, perhaps, to suggest that this level of urban
material culture actively inhibited the translation of London into a city of marble,
fostering instead in its midst a city of sticks.
Where sheds were legitimate, it was because their modernity was decent
and commercial: they enhanced the specialization of spaces and, in some instances,
aided divisions in labor. In these examples, sheds were separate from other, often
permanent, buildings, and provided a place of work, additional storage, or con-
tainment of unpleasant matter and processes. (The clearest example of this is the
continued use throughout London and its environs of sheds to house livestock
and fowl.)84 It was in precisely these terms that Richard Baker and son, makers
of “Lines and Twine,” were proud of their shed, a structure that slotted perfectly
into Barbon’s mercantile vision. Erected on Sun Tavern Fields in Shadwell, it was,
according to the younger Baker, “built as strong as the Carpenter could build it:
We have abundance of Goods there, and we use it as a Ware-house, as well as a
Work-house.”85
Beyond storage, sheds were used for various kinds of production, as the
presence of unprocessed materials attested.86 Sheds used as workshops also offered
a convenient place to conceal stolen goods. When William Barsham, possibly a
gold or silver “spinner,” noticed that £300 worth of “Gold and Silver Waste” was
missing, it was eventually found “in his own Shed under the Place,” where his
servant, John Parker, worked.87 Such structures were part of wider complexes: the
“Silver-Spinner” Thomas Sharpe had both a warehouse for storage and a shed,
which served as his main workshop, where his journeymen and laborers were
stationed.88 Descriptions of fire and crime also gesture toward specialist use, as in
the case of a bricklayer’s shed burning down near Deptford Wharf in 1672.89 In
Marylebone Fields in 1722, a hammer, gouge, auger, and other tools were stolen
from a shed employed as a carpenter’s workshop, while another erected in Long
Acre was used “for priming Cloath for Painters.”90 Increasingly, newspaper adver-
tisements marketed sheds for specific purposes, from tanning, coach building, and
carpentry to storing hops, dying printed calico, and building theatrical scenery.91
Special jobs could call for the construction of temporary workshops. In 1699 a
shed was erected in Whitehall for Mr. Smith “his Majesties Musicall Instrument
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 243
maker to work in during the time he is preparing the Organ” for the newly refitted
Banqueting House.92
Unsurprisingly considering the huge amounts of stuff both bodies were
responsible for processing, preserving, and distributing, government offices, like
the Ordnance and Navy Offices, were enthusiastic builders of sheds for storage
in strategic locations on London’s outskirts, notably Deptford, Chatham, and
Woolwich.93 These structures were conceived on a more robust footing, involving
the input of carpenters who worked with larger teams of laborers, and were part
of wider systems, enabling savings in time and money. When Peter Pett, Com-
missioner of Chatham Dockyard, proposed building a shed to house cables, his
argument to Samuel Pepys turned on the notion that “it would save its charge in
a few years.”94 Systems were evident, too, in other structures: plans to build a gal-
lery in the ropeyard at Woolwich were determined by anticipated improvements
in security and efficiency, with the new addition permitting laborers to “take up
bundles in the street without opening the gates.”95 Government-built temporary
structures also supported expedient measures. In 1743 orders were given to erect
“sheds and other conveniences for opening and airing goods subject to quarantine.”
Interestingly, the temporality of quarantine was reiterated by a stipulation that
“all the materials, &c, used in the said buildings do return to the public” once the
emergency had passed.96
Sheds used as sites of consumption fit into broader histories of the built
environment and material culture of early modern intoxication, as one of the diverse
options available to early modern consumers. In some ways, they were transitional
structures, playing a role in the development of coffeehouses and “dram shops,”
a precursor of the public house.97 London’s very first coffee shop, run by Pasqua
Rosee, was initially located in a small shed in the churchyard of St Michael’s
Cornhill, before being destroyed in the Great Fire. Rosee was able to move into
permanent premises after collecting subscriptions from his customers.98 Without
more information about the spatiality or materiality of these sheds, it is difficult
to say how much they modify recent research on the socio-spatial dimensions of
alcohol’s consumption in the early modern period.99 However, we do know that
some provisional retail drinking establishments were implicated in crime.100 Other
sheds of consumption fit within networks of charity and the burgeoning literature
on early modern women and alcohol.101 In 1678 Mary Leveridge sought permission
from the Duke of Monmouth to sell beer and ale in her “little shed within the Green
Mews” where he had his commodious stables.102 When Mary Frost witnessed a
violent theft in September 1735, it was from the vantage point of “the little shed”
she kept “at the corner of Covent Garden,” where she sold “small Beer and Coffee,
and a Dram for the Market People.”103
Temporary retail structures can be also used to modulate broader histories
of shopping—a historiography that already concerns shifting relationships between
space, time, and materiality.104 The emergence of purpose-built, fixed-location shops
has been identified as the major development in retail during this period, with
shopping no longer an activity for market day or seasonal fairs, but one embedded
in daily life.105 In Claire Walsh’s persuasive argument, shops became “the mental
focus” for consumers.106 And yet, other temporally unstable strategies for selling
coexisted with shops, some of which were structurally and materially comparable
244 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
to sheds.107 Apparatus for fixed markets could be continuously replenished and
added to, like the rows of booths and stands depicted in contemporary views of
Covent Garden Piazza.108 A fan leaf depicting Bartholomew Fair [figure 3] alludes
to the sorts of structures used for occasional retail—booths, stalls, and frames—
alongside the more unusual addition of what appears to be an eighteenth-century
Ferris Wheel. Bartholomew Fair’s disorderliness was expressly tied to the speed
with which its temporary built environment appeared, providing enclosed and
often covered spaces for a range of illicit activities.109
While sheds built for shopping and drinking could become sites of dis-
order, the most ambiguous use of sheds was for shelter. This was even embedded
in the imprecise language used, which elided these sheds-as-dwellings with other
residential terminology, typically “tenement” or “lodging.” An account of one
of Jack Sheppard’s daring jailbreaks even saw him interrupted by “the Master of
the Shed, or House.”110 Some sheds-as-dwellings were also defined by slippage in
use, being places of storage that were improvised as dwellings. When “vagrants”
Edward Conway and his wife Mary sought shelter in September 1680, they asked
permission from William Bale to lodge in “his Out-house or Shed.”111 As with the
“huts” constructed after the Great Fire of London, the decision to live or temporarily
dwell in a shed signified hardship, and sat within networks of charity and patron-
age. Needy men and women sought to continue living in their sheds on the basis
of past service rendered. A crackdown on ad hoc building in the Mews, Whitehall,
in the 1650s exposed these networks, as a series of indigent people petitioned the
Commonwealth. Ellen Foster, widow and mother of three, applied for the right to
stay put in the shed “she built herself,” citing her husband’s service to Charles I,
carefully noting that he had “died before the wars.”112
Crucially, there was a clear distinction between sheds as temporary crisis
management and those that were inhabited on a permanent or semipermanent basis.
Disaster relief, in its proper moment, was deemed necessary, as in the construction
of field hospitals or the structures speedily erected to house displaced persons im-
mediately after the Great Fire.113 These examples underline the political authority
embedded in the timely deployment of temporary shelter. When, in the summer
of 1709, the “poor Palatines” arrived in London, the state dithered over what to
do with Protestant refugees fleeing war, famine, and religious persecution.114 In
scenes that feel horribly reminiscent of more recent refugee crises, the new arrivals
were housed temporarily in army tents on Black Heath and Camberwell Green
throughout the autumn and winter of 1709.115 A less poignant demand saw masons
building “the East Greenwich Church” petition the Commission for Building the
Fifty New Churches for funds for “sheds to shelter their workmen” during the
winter of 1712/13.116
Habitation of sheds was also perceived as out of the ordinary. The biog-
raphy of London merchant-turned-rogue Colonel James Turner described how his
tirade against a tavern servant was cut short when a window flew open. Turner’s
companion interpreted this as a divine rebuke for his “cursing and swearing,” for the
window could not have been animated by a human hand, being “near a story from
the yard which belonged to the Tavern, and a shed of boards from it downward,
that in no probability any man did it.”117 In this instance, “shed” was synonymous
with uninhabited. Similar surprise led to James Cringe being caught red-handed
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 245
Figure 3. John Frederick Setchel (publisher), Bartholomew Fair, unmounted printed fan leaf, 1824 (after
a drawing of ca. 1730). Etching and aquatint with hand-coloring on paper, with letterpress text printed
below. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1978.43.337.
with a “Filch and a half of Bacon and 150 Eggs” taken from the house of Henry
Mason. The constable of St. Mary Whitechapel described unexpectedly “Seeing
a Light in a Shed” in the middle of the night, moving in closer to investigate, and
finding Cringe and two accomplices “cleaning the Bacon.”118
However, it seems more likely that known dwelling in sheds reflected
a much wider social practice, but one that does not necessarily intrude into the
historical record. Indeed, our knowledge of sheds-as-dwellings is limited to the
insights afforded by institutional records, like petitions and sessions papers. Excep-
tions included those sheds that were directly or tangentially linked to disorderly
or unlawful behavior. Combined with the provisional quality of some shed dwell-
ing—the night or two spent in a place used primarily for storage—this is suggestive
of a style of living that was more widely prevalent during the early modern period,
highlighting patterns of improvised dwelling that deserve further scholarly atten-
tion.119 In the meantime, it is worth remembering that “lives lived in the supposed
margins—relative to other types of historical experience—were not marginal to
those living them.”120
CONCLUSION
This discussion has used sheds to interrogate the gap between early modern
London’s built environment as it appears in the secondary literature and the much
broader spectrum of structures present in the historical record. In common with
the study of small-scale speculative building and vernacular architecture, this shift
in focus continues to widen the gulf between “discourse” and “practice” in how
we understand early modern urban space. Most notably, sheds, as a structural
category, permit access to a broad spectrum of uses, materialities, temporalities,
and spatialities, bringing insights into lives lived on the margins, often in the city’s
246 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
less accessible spaces. Sheds were multifunctional—an attribute that destabilized
their social, political, and economic meanings. Here, after all, were structures that
could be both “modern,” in the sense of fitting into rational, mercantile systems,
and the exact opposite, depending on who used them, where and when. Engaging
with sheds adds another layer to the urban fabric, complicating our understand-
ing of the place of the built environment in discussions of early modern London’s
emerging modernity. This study only deals with the tip of the iceberg: there is a
wealth of evidence relating to the array of material interventions that were part of
the early modern ephemeral city, which surely deserve more substantial study. Ad-
ditionally, revealing the social, cultural, commercial, and political world of the early
modern shed makes a compelling methodological point: that a material-culture-led
approach to the early modern built environment can bring considerable insights.
Looking at London through this lens, rather than those of urban or architectural
history, enables a flexible model better equipped to engage with a much wider range
of materials, spaces, and temporalities.
NOTES
I wish to thank Angela McShane, Spike Sweeting, Christina Petrie, Jack Rollo, my colleagues in History
at the University of Manchester, my two anonymous readers who made such incisive comments on
earlier drafts, and Amy Dunagin for her invaluable help during the editorial process.
1. Joel Golby, “London Rental Opportunity of the Week: A F**king Shed—a SHED—in Someone’s
Front Room,” Vice Online, September 2, 2015, http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/london-rental-oppor-
tunity-of-the-week-a-fucking-shed-a-shed-in-someones-front-room-987.
2. Peter Guillery, The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London: A Social and Architectural His-
tory (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2004), 48. See also Hazel Forsyth, Butcher, Baker, Candlestick
Maker: Surviving the Great Fire of London (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 26–36.
3. John Evelyn, Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955),
3:457, 461–62.
4. Evelyn, Diary, 3:461; Petition of Teuis Willemsen to the King, September 24, 1666, The National
Archives (henceforth TNA), SP 29/172, 153.
5. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (1970–74;
repr., London: HarperCollins, 2000), 8:152 (April 5, 1667).
6. London Metropolitan Archives (henceforth LMA), Rep. 79, fol. 292r; Rep. 80, fols. 184r-v.
7. Thomas Catchmead to the King, March? 1671, TNA, SP 29/288, fol. 159; The royal assent to
the petition of Sarah Catchmead, widow of Thomas Catchmead, fishmonger, March 5, 1686, TNA,
SP 44/70, fol. 217.
8. Thomas Catchmead to the King, March? 1671.
9. Ibid.
10. Certificate by twenty-six inhabitants of St. Mary Savoy and St. Clement Dane that the shed was
no offence or annoyance to anyone, March 6, 1671, TNA, SP 29/288, fol. 160; Licence from the King
to Catchmead to continue in the same shed, and prohibition of any to molest him, March 23, 1671,
Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series (henceforth cited as CSPD), Charles II, vol. 11, January–
November 1671, 141.
11. Thomas Catchmead to the King, February? 1671/2, TNA, SP 29/302, fol. 315. See also: CSPD,
Charles II, vol. 12, December 1671–May 1672, 772, 123.
12. Royal assent to the petition of Sarah Catchmead . . . March 5, 1686.
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 247
13. Royal Warrant, 1700, TNA, SP 44/350, fol. 45.
14. Claire Walsh, “Social Meaning and Social Space in the Shopping Galleries of Early Modern
London,” in A Nation of Shopkeepers: Five Centuries of British Retailing, ed. John Benson and Laura
Ugolini (London: I. B. Tauris, 2003), 53, 58. See also notes 94–97.
15. See, for example, Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London: Verso, 2006), 19.
16. Liza Weinstein, The Durable Slum: Dharavi and the Right to Stay Put in Globalizing Mumbai
(Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2014), 7.
17. Ibid.
18. Kathryn Morrison, English Shops and Shopping: An Architectural History (New Haven, CT:
Yale Univ. Press, 2004), 34.
19. Pat Rogers, “The Maypole in the Strand: Pope and the Politics of Revelry,” Journal for Eight-
eenth-Century Studies 28, no. 1 (2005): 83–95.
20. This literature is too vast to do justice to here, but the following were particularly useful in prepar-
ing this article: Penelope J. Corfield, “Walking the City Streets: The Urban Odyssey in Eighteenth-Century
England,” Journal of Urban History 16 (1990): 132–74; Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s
Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: Guilford Press, 1998); Elizabeth McKellar, The Birth of Modern
London: The Development and Design of the City, 1660–1720 (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press,
1999); Peter Clark, ed., The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. 2, 1540–1840 (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2000); J. F. Merritt, ed., Imagining Early Modern London: Perceptions and
Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype, 1598–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2007);
Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner, eds., Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early
Modern London (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2000); Guillery, Small House; Christine Steven-
son, The City and the King: Architecture and Politics in Restoration London (New Haven, CT: Yale
Univ. Press, 2013); Elizabeth McKellar, Landscapes of London: The City, the Country and the Suburbs,
1660–1840 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2013).
21. Hermione Hoby, introduction to Good and Proper Materials: The Fabric of London Since the
Great Fire, ed. Hermione Hobhouse and Ann Saunders (London: London Topographical Society, 1989),
1.
22. John Summerson, Georgian London, ed. Howard Colvin (1945; New Haven, CT: Yale Univ.
Press, 2003); Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town,
1660–1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989); Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of
Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1995).
23. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ., 1956),
66–86; Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, esp. 75–115; Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann, and Victoria Morgan,
Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c. 1680–1830 (London: Routledge,
2007), esp. 57–110; R. H. Sweet, “Topographies of Politeness,” Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society 12 (2002): 355–74.
24. See, for example: Max Byrd, London Transformed: Images of the City in the Eighteenth Century
(New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1978); Simon Foxell, Mapping London: Making Sense of the City
(London: Black Dog, 2007); Joseph Monteyne, The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban
Space, Visual Representation, and Social Exchange (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
25. Guillery, Small House, 279; McKellar, Birth of Modern London, 57.
26. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, 36; Guillery, Small House, 40. See also: Derek Keene, “Growth,
Modernisation and Control: The Transformation of London’s Landscape, c. 1500–c. 1760,” in Two
Capitals: London and Dublin 1500–1840, ed. Peter Clark and Raymond Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 2001), 7–38.
27. Recent examples: Sarah Bonnemaison and Christine Macy, eds., Festival Architecture (London:
Routledge, 2008); Stevenson, City and the King, 63–118; Melanie Doderer-Winkler, Magnificent En-
tertainments: Temporary Architecture for Georgian Festivals (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2013).
248 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
28. Exceptions: Elaine Tierney, “Contested Ideals: Designing and Making Temporary Structures
for the Entrée of Louis XIV into Paris, August 1660,” in Architectures of Festival: Fashioning and
Refashioning Urban and Courtly Space in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Krista De
Jonge (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming 2017); Eric Monin, “The Speculative Challenges of Festival
Architecture in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Bonnemaison and Macy, Festival Architecture, 155–80.
29. Incidental discussions of Tyburn’s architecture include: Lorna Hutson, “Rethinking the ‘Spectacle
of the Scaffold’: Juridical Epistemologies and English Revenge Tragedy,” Representations 89 (2005):
30–58; and Andrea McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775 (London: Ham-
bledon Continuum, 2007). A more substantial account is found in Simon Devereaux, “Recasting the
Theatre of Execution: The Abolition of the Tyburn Ritual,” Past and Present 202 (2009): 127–74.
30. Stobart, Hann, and Morgan, Spaces of Consumption, 3.
31. Rose Marie San Juan, Rome: A City Out of Print (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2001);
Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice (Manchester:
Manchester Univ. Press, 2014); Christy Anderson, ed., The Built Surface, vol. 1, Architecture and the
Pictorial Arts from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002).
32. Caroline van Eck, ed., British Architectural Theory (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Steven Johnston
and Anthony Gerbino, Compass and Rule: Architecture as Mathematical Practice in England (New
Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2009).
33. James I, A Proclamation for Buildings (London, 1615).
34. For an excellent recent treatment of the political virtues of the built environment, see Stevenson,
City and the King.
35. John Evelyn, Fumifugium: Or the Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated,
Together with Some Remedies Humbly Proposed (London, 1661), “To the Reader,” n.p. See also
McKellar, Birth of Modern London, 30.
36. TNA, SP 29/170, fol. 148.
37. C.C. Knowles and P.H. Pitt, The History of the Building Regulation in London, 1189–1972
(London: Architectural Press, 1972).
38. Keene, “Growth, Modernisation and Control,” 29.
39. Guillery, Small House, 49.
40. McKellar, Landscapes of London.
41. McKellar, Birth of Modern London, esp. 25–34.
42. Nicholas Barbon, An Apology for the Builder (London: C. Pullen, 1685), 2.
43. Christopher Wren, Parentalia: Or Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (London: for T. Osborn
and R. Dodsley, 1750), 319.
44. Ibid.
45. Alan Cox, “A Vital Component: Stock Bricks in Georgian London,” Construction History 13
(1997): 57.
46. Cox, “Vital Component,” 57; Stephen Porter, The Great Fire of London (Stroud: Sutton, 1996),
162.
47. Barbon, Apology for the Builder, 4, 5.
48. Quoted in McKellar, Birth of Modern London, 30.
49. “shed, n.” OED Online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/177741?rskey=tVTEn3&result=2#eid
(accessed September 10, 2016).
50. “Covent Garden Market,” in Survey of London: Volume 36, Covent Garden, ed. F. H. W. Shep-
pard (London: London County Council, 1970), 129–50, British History Online, accessed September
10, 2016, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol36/pp129-150.
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 249
51. For example: British Mercury, issue 257, November 12–14, 1711; Weekly Journal with Fresh
Advices Foreign and Domestick, April 30, 1715.
52. “Whitehall Palace: Buildings,” in Survey of London: Volume 13, St Margaret, Westminster, Part
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41–115, British History Online, accessed September 10, 2016, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-
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53. British Mercury, issue 257, November 12–14, 1711.
54. “Memorial III: The Hall,” in Memorials of the Guild of Merchant Taylors of the Fraternity of St.
John the Baptist in the City of London, ed. C. M. Clode (London: Harrison, 1875), 29–42, British History
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55. The City and Country Purchaser, and Builder’s Dictionary (London, 1703), “Tyles,” n.p. See
also The Daily Journal, issue 1923, March 14, 1727.
56. Old Bailey Proceedings (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 6.0, April 17, 2011), Ordinary of
Newgate’s Account, September 1723 (OA17230909), henceforth cited as OBP.
57. See Dorian Gerhold, London Plotted: Plans of London Buildings c.1450–1720 (London: London
Topographical Society, 2016).
58. Daily Post, issue 773, March 22, 1722.
59. Item 464, 5 May 1727, “Minutes of the Commissioners: 1727,” in The Commissions for
Building Fifty New Churches: The Minute Books, 1711–27, A Calendar, ed. M. H. Port (Lon-
don: London Record Society, 1986), 10–16, British History Online, accessed September 10, 2016,
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol23/pp10-16.
60. Jos. Williamson to the Queen Consort, for a lease of 2 small tenements, and a shed near West-
minster, being part of her jointure unjustly concealed, on the discovery of the same at his own charge,
1669?, TNA, SP 29/270, fol. 108; William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1765–69), 4:16, 225.
61. OBP, Ordinary’s Account, April 1742 (OA17420407).
62. Blackstone, Commentaries, 4:226; Matthew Hale, with Giles Jacob, Pleas of the Crown: In Two
Parts (London, 1716), 83.
63. Petition of William Portington, lieutenant of the horse for Middlesex, to the Commissioners for
Buildings, December 1637, TNA, SP 16/374, fol. 149.
64. OBP, June 1736, trial of George Watson otherwise Yorkshire George (t17360610-54); OBP,
May 1740, trial of John Clarke, alias Smith, alias Pugg (t17400522-5).
65. Mark Jenner, “Luxury, Circulation and Disorder: London Streets and Hackney Coaches,
c.1640–c.1740,” in The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, ed. Tim Hitchcock
and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram, 2003).
66. July 7, 1725, “Volume 253: June 1–December 25, 1725,” in Calendar of Treasury Papers, Volume 6,
1720–1728, ed. Joseph Redington (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1889), 342–76, British History
Online, accessed September 10, 2016, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-treasury-papers/vol6/pp342-376.
67. OBP, January 1732, trial of Corbet Vezey (t17320114-12).
68. OBP, January 1735, trial of Elizabeth Ambrook (t17350116-11).
69. June 6, 1706, “Volume 98: April 1–June 29, 1706,” in Calendar of Treasury Papers, Volume 3,
1702–1707, ed. Joseph Redington (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1874), 427–46, British History
Online, accessed September 10, 2016, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-treasury-papers/vol3/pp427-446.
70. July 4, 1717, “Treasury Warrants: July 1717, 1–5,” in Calendar of Treasury Books, Volume
31, 1717, ed. William A. Shaw and F. H. Slingsby (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1960),
387–95, British History Online, accessed September 10, 2016, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-
treasury-books/vol31/pp387-395.
250 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
71. October 5, 1706, “Warrant Books: October 1706, 1–15,” in Calendar of Treasury Books, Volume 21,
1706–1707, ed. William A. Shaw (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1952), 56–67, British History
Online, accessed September 10, 2016, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-treasury-books/vol21/pp56-67.
72. Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella, ed. Abigail Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,
2013), 365.
73. OBP, February 1717, trial of John Barns (t17170227-35).
74. OBP, July 1736, trial of John Maxworth, otherwise Paddy, otherwise Parliament Jack
(t17360721-13).
75. OBP, Ordinary’s Account, September 1735 (OA17350922).
76. For example: Postman and Historical Account, issue 996, July 25–28, 1702; London Gazette,
issue 5230, June 1–5, 1714; Daily Post, issue 2381, May 26, 1727.
77. July 25, 1716, “Treasury Warrants: July 1716, 21–31,” in Calendar of Treasury Books, Volume
30, 1716, ed. William A. Shaw and F. H. Slingsby (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1958),
362–84, British History Online, accessed September 10, 2016, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-
treasury-books/vol30/pp362-384.
78. OBP, April 1738, trial of George Manning (t17380412-56).
79. Barbon, Apology for the Builder, 4; McKellar, Birth of Modern London, 58–59.
80. Barbon, Apology for the Builder, 5–6.
81. For a provocative overview of this literature, see Frank Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future
of History: Things, Practices, and Politics,” Journal of British Studies 48 (2009): 283–307.
82. Barbon, Apology for the Builder, 4; McKellar, Birth of Modern London, 58–59.
83. William C. Baer, “Housing the Poor and Mechanick Class in Seventeenth-Century London,”
The London Journal 25, no. 2 (2000): 13–39; Tim Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century
London (London: Hambledon and London, 2004); William Baer, “Housing for the Lesser Sort in Stuart
London: Findings from Certificates, and Returns of Divided Houses,” The London Journal 33, no. 1
(2008): 61–88; Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making
of a Modern City, 1690–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2015).
84. OBP, August 1695, trial of William Whitehead (t16950828-57); January 1715, trial of John
Edwards (t17150114-43); December 1725, trial of John Stringer John Cornwall (t17251208-83);
June 1715, trial of Thomas Evans (t17150602-27); June 1728, trial of Edward Walton John Parker
(t17280605-46).
85. OBP, January 1736, trial of Richard Dun Isaiah Beshaw otherwise Dye William Robinson
(t17360115-5).
86. OBP, April 1716, trial of John Smith (t17160411-8).
87. OBP, December 1726, trial of John Parker (t17261207-3). See also January 1741, trial of Charles
Shooter (t17410116-2).
88. OBP, February 1731, trial of Elizabeth Panton (t17310224-41).
89. CSPD, Charles II, vol. 12, December 1671–May 1672, 1392, 219.
90. OBP, May 1722, trial of George Chadwick (t17220510-39); January 1736, trial of James Da-
vison (t17360115-25).
91. The Daily Post, issue 773, March 22, 1722; The Daily Post, issue 1340, January 13, 1724; The
Daily Courant, issue 2577, January 27–29, 1726; The Daily Post, issue 3134, October 6, 1729; The
Daily Post, issue 7057, June 3, 1724.
92. “The Banqueting House,” in Survey of London: Volume 13, St Margaret, West-
minster, Part II: Whitehall I, ed. Montagu H. Cox and Philip Norman (London: London
County Council, 1930), 116–39, British History Online, accessed September 10, 2016,
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol13/pt2/pp116-139.
Tierney / Exploring the Ephemeral City in Early Modern London 251
93. Howard Tomlinson, Guns and Government: The Ordnance Office under the Later Stuarts (Lon-
don: Royal Historical Society, 1979); Richard W. Stewart, The English Ordnance Office, 1585–1625:
A Case Study in Bureaucracy (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society, 1996).
94. CSPD, Charles II, vol. 3, January 1663–August 1664, CI.54, p. 668; CI.7, 658; see also CSPD,
Charles II, Addenda: 1660–1685, 1368, 271; State Papers Domestic Supplementary vol. 137, Admiralty,
1660–1673, 137.127, 5.
95. CSPD, Charles II, vol. 4, September 1664–September 1665, CXX.35.I, 345.
96. September 28 and October 5, 1743, “Treasury Books and Papers: October 1743,” in Cal-
endar of Treasury Books and Papers, Volume 5, 1742–1745, ed. William A. Shaw (London: His
Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1903), 319–26, British History Online, accessed August 17, 2016,
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-treasury-books-papers/vol5/pp319-326.
97. Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (London: Longman, 1983);
Beat Kümin, Drinking Matters: Public Houses and Social Exchange in Early Modern Central Europe
(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 17–49; Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (London: Studio
Vista, 1975), 28–30.
98. Markman Ellis, “Pasque Rosee’s Coffee-House, 1652–1666,” London Journal, 29, no. 1 (2004):
2, 6, 8–9.
99. Phil Withington, “Company and Sociability in Early Modern England,” Social History 32, no. 3
(2007): 291–307; Phil Withington and Angela McShane, eds., Cultures of Intoxication: Past & Present
Supplement (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2014); Mark Hailwood, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in
Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2014).
100. See OBP, January 1724, trial of Stephen Gardiner and John Martin (t17240117-8); April 1724,
trial of Ann James (t17240415-25).
101. See, for example: A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Europe (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern
England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007); Tim Reinke-Williams, Women, Work and Sociability in Early
Modern London (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 117–24; Reinke-Williams, “Women, Ale
and Company in Early Modern London,” Brewery History 135 (2010): 88–106.
102. Petition of Mary Leveridge to the Duke of Monmouth to sell her beer and ale in a little shed
hired of . . . Williams within the Green Mews, December 20, 1678, TNA, SP 44/41, fol. 109. See also:
Petition of Mary Wigmore to Sir Joseph Williamson for charity, having built a small shed on a piece
of ground granted her by the King, [March?] 1672, TNA, SP 29/304, fol. 243; Charles Lethbridge
Kingsford, The Early History of Piccadilly, Leicester Square, Soho, and their Neighbourhood (1925;
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013), 50–51.
103. OBP, September 1735, trial of Edward Birch (t17350911-75).
104. For excellent socio-spatial analysis of shopping, see Stobart, Hann, and Morgan, Spaces of
Consumption.
105. Claire Walsh, “Stalls, Bulks, Shops and Long-Term Change in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Cen-
tury England,” in The Landscape of Consumption, ed. Jan Hein Furnée and Clé Lesger (Houndsmill:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 57–77; Nancy Cox, The Complete Tradesman: A Study of Retailing (Al-
dershot: Ashgate, 2000); Jon Stobart, Sugar and Spice: Grocers and Groceries in Provincial England,
1650–1830 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2012); Morrison, English Shops.
106. Claire Walsh, “The Advertising and Marketing of Consumer Goods in Eighteenth-Century
London,” in Advertising and the European City: Historical Perspectives, ed. Clemens Wischermann
and Elliott Shore (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 79–95.
107. Colin Smith, “The Wholesale and Retail Markets of London, 1660–1840,” Economic History
Review 55, no. 1 (2002): 31–50; Morrison, English Shops, 12–18; Walsh, “Stalls, Bulks, Shops”; Anne
Wohlcke, The “Perpetual Fair”: Gender, Disorder and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth-Century London
(Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2014).
252 Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 50, No. 2
108. See, for example, Joseph van Aken, Covent Garden Piazza and Market, c.1725–30, oil on canvas,
no. A7466, Museum of London.
109. Observator, issue 39, August 18–21, 1703.
110. Weekly Journal or British Gazatteer, November 21, 1724.
111. OBP, September 1680, trial of Edward Conway and Mary his Wife Edward Conway (t16800910-
8).
112. CSPD, Commonwealth, vol. 7, March–December 1654, LXX.101, 137.
113. Christine Stevenson, Medicine and Magnificence: British Hospital and Asylum Architecture,
1660–1815 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 2001), 45–46.
114. Philip Otterness, “The 1709 Palatine Migration and the Formation of German Immigrant Identity
in London and New York,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 66 (1999): 8–23.
115. The Palatines Catachism, Or, A True Description of their Camps at Black-Heath and Camberwell
(London, 1709).
116. The Commissions for Building Fifty New Churches: The Minute Books, 1711–27, A Calendar,
ed. M. H. Port (London, 1986), 159–75, British History Online, accessed September 10, 2016, http://
www.british-history.ac.uk/london-record-soc/vol23/pp159-175.
117. Anon., The Triumph of Truth in an Exact and Impartial Relation of the Life and Conversation
of Col. Iames Turner (London: W. G., 1663), 27–28.
118. OBP, February 1719, trial of James Cringe (t17190225-1).
119. Keene, “Growth, Modernisation and Control,” 23–26; Guillery, Small House, 52.
120. Alan Mayne and Tim Murray, introduction to The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes: Explo-
rations in Slumland, ed. Mayne and Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001), 3.
Elaine Tierney
