Read on Twitter
Give money, get something named after you. We see it in sports stadiums, hospital wings, college dorms. This thread is about a London street named after the man who gave the money to construct it - almost 500 years ago! Lambs Conduit Street. 1/
Today Lamb's Conduit Street is an often-bustling street in #Bloomsbury, not far from the @BritishMuseum and @GreatOrmondSt Hospital. But Tudor London didn't extend beyond Holborn, and Bloomsbury would have been mostly fields.
Elizabethan London was, of course, famous for being filthy. Muck lined the streets, contributing to regular outbreaks of plague, a history the more genteel Victorians tried to eradicate, changing some street names in the process - Passing Alley, most famously, from Pissing Alley.
London was growing, and in need of a clean water supply. But the Thames and the more minor rivers that flowed through the City did not meet this description, so there was a need to bring it in from the fresher ponds and creeks north of the city via a series of pipes - conduits.
Enter William Lambe. Born in Kent in 1495, Lambe made his way to London and entered the cloth trade, living next to the Chapel of St James-in-the-Wall & its small monastery. There's no record of his early days, but Henry VIII's London was an auspicious time to be a clothier.
France and England had been in on-and-off conflict for centuries, but in 1520 their Kings opted for diplomacy and met on a field between English Calais and French Ardres. There, both sides laid on a display of such luxury the meeting is known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold.
It was a remarkable occasion. A temporary palace was built for Henry, his retinue of thousands, and his personal zoo including two gold-leaf painted monkeys. Wine flowed from fountains. Tents were woven of silk and gold. And oh, the clothes!
The Chapel Royal records those who contributed to its efforts to support this sumptuous event, including the wardrobiers who would have designed and made the clothing for its retinue, and even for the King's use during religious services. Among those names is William Lambe.
Lambe appears to have leveraged his role in the grandiose (though diplomatically unproductive) meeting of Kings, and his connection with the Chapel Royal, to become a very successful, and quite wealthy, clothier who likely counted King Henry among his customers.
In 1529 Henry famously sought an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and, being denied it by the Pope, broke from Catholicism and named himself head of the new @ChurchofEngland. The #Reformation had begun.
The Reformation was as much about money as politics. Henry seized the Church's properties, making the crown immensely wealthy and, through auctions or gifts, creating a new class of oligarchs in a moment not entirely unlike post-Soviet Russia's sell-off of State companies.
Lambe, through his relationship with #HenryVIII, persuaded the King to sell to him, at a cut price, the same Chapel of St James (now void of its previous monk inhabitants) by which had lived all these years. He ultimately bequeathed the property to the Company of Clothworkers.
Now a rich man, Lambe set about a campaign of philanthropy that continued for the rest of his life, primary among which was a 2,000-yard system of piping to bring fresh spring water to the northern edge of London - Lambe's Conduit.
Along with the piping, Lambe also provided 120 buckets for the poor to carry home the water, which was, according to a 1580 memorial biography "sweete, pleasant, and holsome, as neither riche nor poore can well misse." Lambe's total outlay for the project was £1,500.
Lambe died in 1580 and was buried in St Pauls. In 1875 the Company of Clothworkers (which exists to this day), based on the land Lambe bequeathed, built a new church to serve the Victorian housing estate of Islington, and named it St James. In a corner sits a monument to Lambe.
But Lambe's most famous memorial, of course, is the street that bears his name in London, Lamb's Conduit Street, running alongside where Lambe's conduit once followed. £1,500, a large sum 500 years ago, seems a good price for immortality!
