Drury Lane Trigger warning: sex, sex work, sexual assault, rape. Unsuitable for children. * Drury Lane has been a very culturally important street for a very long time. Until Kingsway was finished in 1905, it was the main arterial route for traffic between, on one side, Bloomsbury and all of the fashionable new developments to the west, and on the other, the River Thames and the City of London. Due to its length, it was split between several parishes. Within St. Clement Danes was only the eastern side of Drury Lane from the junction with Wych Street (now bulldozed and replaced with Aldwych) to just south of the junction with Princes Street. Even this tiny stretch of Drury Lane was so heavily populated and economically important it gave its name to an entire ward of the parish. * The theatre was a very important influence on this part of Drury Lane from the Restoration onwards, with the Drury Lane playhouse just yards away from the St. Clement Danes parish boundary; this was for a long time one of only two ‘patent theatres’ in London, with royal permission to perform spoken drama. In lesser theatres, like Sadler’s Wells, there were a variety of light theatrical entertainments, but only Drury Lane and its lone competitor – based out of the Portugal Street playhouse from 1695 until the early 1720s – staged full plays. From the 1730s a dedicated opera house opened not far from the playhouse in Covent Garden, again yards away from St. Clement Danes’s portion of Drury Lane. These two uniquely important venues brought hundreds of genteel audience members to Drury Lane every week during the London season, all purchasing tickets and transport, and many seeking refreshment, or even carnal pleasure. This exuberance of spending allowed a professional leisure industry to flourish, from elite musicians to actors to sex workers. * As you would expect, a lot of the servants recorded in the St. Clement Danes parish settlement examinations (see the record for St. Clement Danes) who worked along Drury Lane worked for public houses. There were plenty of tradesmen’s servants too, though – a servant to a cheesemonger, another to a button maker, and a third to a coach maker. A shoemaker’s servant and a tailor’s servant worked in some of the courts and alleys leading off Drury Lane. Other than the coach maker, there were tradesmen like this in every neighbourhood of London, providing victuals and mending clothes. There were also some servants to country gentlemen who were staying in lodgings in Drury Lane, probably above a shop or public house. However, musicians, actors and sex workers are all invisible in these records, since they rarely hired servants to help them in their work (and in the case of the latter category, servants would not wish to disclose their employer’s trade to a parish official). We have to find other ways to discover who lived and worked in Drury Lane. * Researcher Catherine Harbor, drawing from a database of musical newspaper advertisements, collected a list of musicians’ names and addresses, as well as concert venues in the first half of the eighteenth century. I have placed all of those in the vicinity of St. Clement Danes on a German map of 1735 (see cover image). Although most of these genteel musicians lived further to the west, amongst the gentry in St. James Westminster and the new developments around Oxford Street, there are considerable clusters of musicians living on either side of Drury Lane, including the composer Thomas Arne, who lived on Duke Street and (at a different point in his life) Great Queen Street, both opening onto Drury Lane. Arne composed ‘Rule Britannia’ and harmonised ‘God Save the Queen’. Actors also lived and congregated in the area, an informal theatrical club forming at the Black Jack tavern in Lincoln’s Inn Fields (see record for Carey Street). * In terms of sex work, although brothels and sex workers could be found in every poorly-lit alley, Drury Lane had a notorious reputation as a red-light district. In a short, lewd booklet named The Female Glossary, published in 1732 (which attempts to define various euphemisms for a woman’s genitals) a number of sexual terms are considered unique to ‘the Hundreds of Drury’, namely, Drury Lane and all of the many narrow courts, lanes and alleys that led from it. (Hundreds were an ancient, purely nominal division of English local government separate from parishes or counties.) This reputation made sense when you consider the urban landscape. Drury Lane was a principal arterial route between London and Westminster, a playground for the wealthy and the ‘middling sorts’, and yet it was a narrow street lined with old, warren-like buildings and narrower, noisome courts and lanes. All manner of people passed through Drury Lane, many of them at perfect leisure to indulge their appetites. The old, complex warrens of narrow yards and tall buildings provided plenty of privacy. As for the nature of the work carried out, and the complex relationships between sex work, rape culture and misogyny, see the record for Star Court. * However, the central infrastructure of all early-modern leisure – musical, theatrical, conversational, sexual – was the public house, and Drury Lane abounded in these. (For more information about how the public house was central to commerce, trade and work, see the record for Claremarket.) They came in all shapes and sizes, from the grandness of the Crown and Anchor Tavern on Arundel Street – important enough to merit its own record – to the dusty parlours of unlicensed gin distilleries. This record will explore how people used public houses for leisure, what the sources of entertainment were, what food and drink and other services were available, and the power dynamics of the public house. If you are looking for a full-length history of English public houses, I thoroughly recommend Peter Clark’s book The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200-1830. * Let’s look at some real examples of visitors to Drury Lane’s public houses. Data collected from court witness statements (analysed by Hans-Joachim Voth) suggests most people stopped work around 6, at the end of a 12-hour workday, but many people popped into public houses for refreshment or meetings throughout the day. Even so, Drury Lane’s public houses would probably have been fullest in the late evening. Even well past midnight some witnesses were entering and leaving public houses. Between 1 and 2 am Benjamin Gosling, a bricklayer, met with one Phillis Noble at the corner of Bennet’s Court, a tiny, densely inhabited alley a couple of blocks from Blackmore Street. This was in the early hours of a chilly Monday morning, 3rd January 1726. Sunday was almost always a day off in the early modern period, unless work was absolutely unavoidable. Those who did not go to church – and some who did – often drank heavily on a Sunday, and took Monday off as well when they could. This practice was so common the day was nicknamed ‘St. Monday’ – for, like a saint’s day, there was more drinking and sleeping than working. Benjamin Gosling, being out so late into Sunday night, probably was not preparing to wake at 6 a.m. the next day to begin heavy manual work. * Thanks to the wildly inconsistent level of detail the Old Bailey Proceedings provide (see the record for Hollowell Street), we have a verbatim record of what Gosling said in court. This is how he described meeting Phillis Noble: “as I was coming by the Corner of Bennets Court, in Drury-Lane; who should I meet but [Phillis]? so says she, How dye do my Dear, - 'tis bloody cold Weather, - I wish you'd give me a Dram. Whereof, says I again, I don't care if I do, if we can come to a good Fire, and so - what signifies lying - we struck a Bargain, and went to a Gin Shop, and I thought I had better do so than wander about the Street all Night, tho' I must needs say, I might as well have gone home to any Wife, - but that's neither here nor there”. There is a certain level of innuendo here that suggests their tryst was not merely platonic. Although women were vilified for having sexual partners outside marriage, it was increasingly acceptable among men (see the record for Star Court), so that he felt happy making these intimations in a public sphere. Public houses were a great place to begin an affair or negotiate a night’s paid fun. Benjamin Gosling’s case very closely resembles that of William Hopkins. In February 1728, 11 pm on a Sunday night, he “treated [Sarah Hudson] with a Quartern of Geneva [gin]”, in a Drury Lane brandy shop “he knew … to have a very ill Name”, before the two retired together to a back room, where his pocket was allegedly picked. The way Phillis Noble picked up Benjamin Gosling was exactly the same, asking for a shot of hard liquor (a dram) in a public house and seeing how things would go from there. * In any case, whether your interest in a person was sexual, friendly or commercial, introductions were important to early modern Londoners. Around 75% of Londoners had come to the city from elsewhere – in the seventeenth century, often escaping rural poverty in the North of England, and in the eighteenth, mostly young people from the Home Counties attracted by higher wages and new social opportunities. You needed a network of friends and acquaintances around you to gain a good, trustworthy reputation – otherwise getting a job, getting credit from shopkeepers or defending yourself from crimes or disputes was impossible.