Saffron Hill

Names

  • Saffron Hill
  • Great Saffron Hill

Street/Area/District

  • Saffron Hill

Maps & Views

Descriptions

from A Dictionary of London, by Henry Harben (1918)

Saffron Hill

North out of Holborn, outside the City boundary.

Mentioned in Middlesex Sessions' Roll, 20 Jas. I., as the next lane adjoining Field Lane (Midd. Co. Records, II. 171).

from A New View of London, by Edward Hatton (1708)

Saffron hill, betn Field lane (near Holbourn Bridge) S. and Hatton wall N. L. 420 Yds.

from A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, by John Strype (1720)

Saffron hill takes its beginning at Field lane, and runs Northwards to Vine street. It is a Place of small Account, both to Buildings and Inhabitants; and pestered with small and ordinary Alleys and Courts, taken up by the meaner Sort of People; especially the East side, unto the Town Ditch, which separates this Parish from St. James's Clarkenwel. And over this Ditch, most of the Allies have a small boarded Bridge: As Castle Alley, Bell Alley, and Blue Ball Alley.

from London and Its Environs Described, by Robert and James Dodsley (1761)

Saffron hill, Field lane, at the bottom of Snow hill.

from Lockie's Topography of London, by John Lockie (1810)

Saffron-Hill (Great), Holborn-Bridge,—the continuation of Field-lane, where the numbers begin and end, viz. 1 and 150, extending to Vine-st. and Hatton-wall.

from A Topographical Dictionary of London and Its Environs, by James Elmes (1831)

Saffron-Hill, Great, Holborn-bridge, is the continuation of Field-lane.

from London Past and Present: Its History, Associations, and Traditions, by Henry Benjamin Wheatley and Peter Cunningham (1891)

Saffron Hill, a densely inhabited neighbourhood between Holborn and Clerkenwell. It was formerly a part of Ely Gardens [see Ely House], and derives its name from the crops of saffron which it bore. It runs from Field Lane into Vine Street, so called from the vineyard attached to old Ely House. So bad was the reputation of the locality thirty or forty years ago that the clergymen of St. Andrew's, Holborn (the parish in which the purlieu lies), were obliged, when visiting it, to be accompanied by policemen in plain clothes. Dickens described Saffron Hill and its purlieus with his darkest colours, but not darker than those who knew the neighbourhood of old felt to be deserved.

Thence into Little Saffron Hill, and so into Saffron Hill the Great. ... A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen. The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air was inpregnated with filthy odours. ... The sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the place were the public houses, and in them the lowest orders of Irish were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of houses where drunken men and women were positively wallowing in filth; and from several of the doorways great ill-looking fellows were cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, on no very well-disposed or harmless errands.—Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, 1838, chap. viii.

The street is not very clean nor very fragrant even now, nor is the appearance of its occupants reassuring, but it is a very different place to what it was when Dickens wrote. Part of it has been cleared away for the Clerkenwell improvements, and the rest has been partially cleansed and purified and brought under stricter police supervision. The church, St. Peter's, was designed 1830–1832 by Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Barry, and was one of his earliest works in Gothic architecture.

The Duke of Muscovy declared war against Poland, because he and his nation had been vilified by a Polish poet: but the author of the Ecclesiastical Politie would, it seems, disturb the peace of Christendom for the good old cause of a superannuated chanter of Saffron Hill and Pye Corner.—Andrew Marvell, Rehearsal Transprosed, 1674, pt. ii. p. 65.