Old London by the Sea

British readers at least will probably know that Brighton is referred to as ‘London by the Sea’ or ‘London on Sea’, but did you know that Swanage has earned the name ‘Old London by the Sea’? To find out why, we return to the subject of a previous blog on the Alfred Memorial and the family who shaped Swanage as we know it today: John Mowlem and his nephew George Burt.

John Mowlem (1788-1868) was a Swanage native, a quarry boy, who travelled to London at age nineteen in search of better prospects. These he found in abundance, rising to found his own stonemasonry business and bringing in his nephew, George Burt (1816-1894) and George’s brother-in-law to form the company Mowlem, Freeman & Burt.

Victorian London was, as London has probably always been, a place where demolition, alteration, and rebuilding was constantly taking place. Mowlem, and Burt especially, who in addition to being a shrewd stonemason seems also to have had squirreling tendencies, took to collecting interesting specimens of stonemasonry (and more), rescuing them from London buildings. Their hobby was also enabled by a very practical consideration: when ships returned from delivering their weighty loads of Portland stone and Purbeck marble to London and beyond, they needed ballast (otherwise they would sit too high in the water and be difficult to handle). Burt and Mowlem provided that with their iron and stone relics of the capital.

Repurposing masonry wasn’t anything knew, of course – a famous Dorset example is the amount of masonry from Corfe Castle that found its way into houses in the village. But George Burt seems to have considered the whole town of Swanage a display area for his collection, which means that you can conduct an interesting I-spy tour of the town spotting the curiosities he and his uncle brought down from London. To give you a taste, here are a few I spied for myself with a little help from local guides (including my father). (Wonky, blurred, or not, these are all my own photos.)

Purbeck House Hotel

Purbeck House, sitting part way up the High Street, was originally a Georgian house bought by George Burt. Burt decided to rebuild it into a castle-like residence, but his extravagance was tempered with a country boy’s thrift, and the house and its environs almost constitute a museum of London.

The gardens, of course, became a depository for Burt’s collection. Leading into the garden of what is now Purbeck House Hotel, there is a stone archway (photo above) that the firm actually built themselves for Hyde Park, but was taken down when the park underwent ‘improvements’. If you wander inside, you’ll find a series of garden rooms, and near the back, an old summer house known as ‘the Temple’, which has three rather worn statues rescued from the Royal Exchange. One is fairly complete, and the other two just torsos. The first is claimed to be the founder of the Royal Exchange, Thomas Gresham, apparently the only statue that survived when the Exchange was burned down in the Great Fire of London (1666). However, as far as I know, while the statue is genuine to the period, there is no corroborating evidence that it is indeed Gresham. The two headless statues were survivors of a second fire in 1838. Burt labelled them as Kings Charles I and II, but this has been disputed and other kings suggested (there was a series of statues of the sovereigns in the Exchange, all auctioned off after the 1838 fire). Columns surrounding the summer house came from toll houses by Waterloo Bridge and, although I didn’t sneak inside, apparently the floor is paved with tiles from the lobby of the House of Commons (Mowlem’s worked in Parliament in the 1880s).

In the 1870s, the firm landed a huge contract to rebuild Billingsgate fish market, and Burt had building material and other items brought down to Swanage to incorporate into his residence. The weather vane from Billingsgate was designated for the tower at Purbeck House, but it later moved to Newton Manor, further up the High Street. Anyone who happens to look up at the roof might think this was just a whimsical nod to Swanage’s coastal location, not dreaming that it in fact came from London’s iconic fish market.

By the way, there are many more London gems inside the hotel, but sadly they don’t open up their bar or restaurant to non-guests, apart from evening drinks, so I had to confine myself to invading the gardens.

The Town Hall

Near Purbeck House Hotel, on the opposite side of the road, is Swanage Town Hall. Originally, there were cottages on the site, but they were demolished in 1881 by Burt for the new building. If you look up (you’ll crick your neck less if you do it from across the road), you’ll see a frontage that comes from the Mercer’s Hall in Cheapside. The Mercers’ Company had intended to keep this front when planning to rebuild, but it was so begrimed with ‘London black’ (some of us remember all those black buildings, which were still being cleaned up in the 1980s!) that restoration would have cost more than making a replica. So it was left once again to Burt to be thrifty and bring it down to Swanage.

Wellington Clock Tower

No, the name is not a local legend – this monument really was built to honour the Duke of Wellington (in 1854), and stood by London Bridge in Southwark until it became an obstruction to traffic. It was also apparently a bad time keeper (this was blamed on the aforementioned traffic) and therefore a poor tribute to the punctual Duke of Wellington. Where the City of London saw a nuisance, George Burt saw an opportunity, and brought the tower to Swanage, dismantled and put back together brick by brick. It stands on the road leading up to Peveril Point (the defective clock did not make the journey). As you can see from my long-distance photo, the clock is rather obscured by all the development in that direction in recent decades, but it still stands out oddly on the rising coastline.

Any old iron?

Iron made an excellent ballast for ships, and Burt brought his share back from London to Swanage. Unfortunately, a set of lampposts from Hanover square, originally used for Swanage’s first gas lamps (Burt also first supplied the town with gas) have been sold and scrapped. However, more interesting oddities remain – the London bollards. An aside – in the writing of this blog, I learned that London bollards were actually first cobbled together from defective cannon, with the top being a cannon ball wedged into the muzzle! If you’re in London, keep an eye out for these, for example on Tower Hill. If you’re down in Swanage, look out for later versions, if you’re lucky, embossed with clues as to their London origins. There are far fewer than a century ago, since many were taken for scrap in the Second World War. Here are photos of a set I found down the lane from the town hall, by the old lock-up.

George Burt effectively put an end to his collecting habit by another of his projects – bringing the railway to Swanage. This modern form of transport ended the need for the old boats. Perhaps Burt’s wife and many in Swanage heaved a sigh of relief at this. However, we’re left with the quirky legacy of Swanage that is overlooked by most people who see it only as a cheap and cheerful seaside town.

If you want to go exploring for yourself, I recommend you drop in at the Swanage Museum and Heritage Centre and talk to the staff. I bought the booklet Curiosities of Swanage, or, Old London by the Sea to help guide my explorations. A lot of these monuments seem to be in out-of-the way places, but that’s because the direction of Swanage’s development changed, away from the old High Street and towards the railway.

Sources:

Curiosities of Swanage, or, Old London by the Sea (1971, reprinted 2007). You’ll find most of the facts I mentioned above in this book, but I had other informal sources for these facts, including my own and my father’s local knowledge.

Swanage Museum and Heritage Centre – swanagemuseum.org.uk

Historic England – historicengland.org.uk (search for Swanage)