Abstract
THE contributions of Shoreditch to the advancement of science are neither many nor varied; the occasional visitor to that cabinet-making region is usually drawn thither by the fame of the parish stocks and whipping-post, or of that oddly inscribed tombstone which marks Dr. John Gardner's “last and best bedroom”. But the district has made one contribution of primary importance, for it was in the. parish of St. Leonard's Shoreditch that Edmond Halley was born in 1656. Shoreditch was then a suburb of that pre-fire London of which so few traces remain. The London that Halley knew was a London cheerful, noisy and dirty, to modern eyes incredibly small, with narrow, fetid, kerbless streets and rat-ridden, overhanging houses; with a steep descent to the Meet river, then practically an open sewer, where Holborn viaduct now stands; with an equally steep ascent to Tyburn along that via dolorosa, now called Oxford Street; with one ancient many-arched bridge joining the city to Southward, its gateway crowned with frowning and blackened heads, its piers and starlings damming the river so effectively as to produce at certain stages of the tide several feet difference of level in the water above and below the bridge; with Whitehall still crossed by a Tudor gateway, and the banqueting house of Inigo Jones alive with recent memories of the royal execution.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
FERGUSON, A. Edmond Halley*. Nature 131, 153–156 (1933). https://doi.org/10.1038/131153a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/131153a0