This unassuming little street used to run between Charing Cross Road and the Embankment, creating a main thoroughfare on the riverside. Today it is cut off at both ends, a no through road visited mainly by local workers, and those who have found out its secrets – for Craven Street is woven into both British and American history, not to mention literature.
As it’s now November, we’ll start with literature, as it was this street which provided Charles Dickens with his inspiration for the door knocker haunting at the beginning of A Christmas Carol. The hideous door knocker which transfigures into the face of his long-dead partner Jacob Marley originally hung at number 8 Craven Street. Not literally, obviously the one at number eight wasn’t haunted and didn’t try to save the souls of those who knocked on it, but it was by all accounts, pretty scary; certainly ugly and memorable enough to secure its place in the canon of British literature.
Unfortunately number 8 Craven Street, and its horrendous door knocker, were destroyed when the street was re-routed in the early twentieth century.
The knocker may well have been known to Benjamin Franklin and William Hewson though, who shared a house at number 16, along with Hewson’s wife and mother-in-law (poor bloke!). Regular readers of this blog will have heard us rave about the Franklin House museum before – it’s a fascinating place, both reconstructed home of a US Founding Father and slightly eerie basement museum displaying the human bones which were found in the garden, left over from Hewson’s private medical school.
While he was in the UK, Franklin worked as a printer at the church of St Bartholomew the Great in Spitalfields and dabbled in scientific experiments, designing the world’s first lightening conductor, which was tested on St Brides Church in Fleet Street after much argument with the king.
Also nearby is the unique Ship and Shovell pub, named after a previous Admiral of the Fleet, Sir Cloudesley Shovell . A popular naval hero in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, he rose through the ranks to command the British fleet, and become MP for Rochester! It’s a popular haunt with local workers, although they very rarely get bored going there, as it’s really two pubs in one, a ‘branch’ either side of Craven Passage, the tiny, historic alleyway which connects The Strand and Villiers Street.
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