Tales of London

To this day, many of the City of London's streets are still named after the trades that took place on them centuries ago. There are the obvious examples such as Bread Street, Poultry, and Cornhill, as well as those of a slightly more cryptic variety such as Cheapside (Old English for a marketplace) and Cannon Street (a corruption of Candlewick Street). At first glance it may be assumed that Wardrobe Place, just off Carter Lane, had once been home to cabinet makers - but its nomenclature is rather more regal in origin.

The Royal Wardrobe – also known as the King’s Wardrobe – began life as a government department rather than an actual bricks and mortar building. Originally based in the now-ruined Wardrobe Tower at the Tower of London, it was used for the storage of the king’s royal accoutrements, arms, clothing, and personal items. It was also responsible for keeping the accounts of the Royal Household, and at times the Wardrobe rivalled the Treasury in power and influence.

By the fourteenth century the Tower of London was being used predominantly for storage of arms, armaments and armour, and space was at a premium. Items from the Wardrobe were overspilling into other locations around London, including on Lombard Street.

In 1361 Sir John Beauchamp, Admiral of the Fleet and Warden of the Cinque Ports, died, and his home south of St Paul’s Cathedral was purchased by Edward III. Edward made this house his new Wardrobe, storing his state and ceremonial robes, along with those of ambassadors, ministers, and Knights of the Garter; beds and furnishings; and cloths and hangings for coronations, funerals, and other occasions of state. Edward’s grandson and successor Richard II lodged at the Wardrobe in 1381 during the Peasants’ Revolt, the rebels having successfully seized the Tower of London; the following morning Richard departed the Wardrobe to meet the peasants at Smithfield, where their leader Watt Tyler was stabbed to death. In 1604 William Shakespeare was granted four-and-a-half-yards of scarlet cloth from the Wardrobe for James I’s coronation, as Shakespeare was a member of the King’s Men acting troupe. Nine years later he would purchase a house around the corner from the Wardrobe, on the corner of Ireland Yard and St Andrew’s Lane.

After the English Civil War of the 1640s and the establishment of the republican Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, the Wardrobe was converted into an orphanage. Following the Restoration to the throne of Charles II in 1660, however, Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich – the newly appointed Master of the Great Wardrobe – wanted the property returned to its original function. In what could be described as a harsher version of Britain’s Got Talent, the orphans sang to the Earl in a bid to retain their home, but the Earl was unmoved, gave them a fiver, and told them to bugger off out of his property. The diarist Samuel Pepys was in the employ of the Earl, and recorded in the entry for the 21st June 1660:

“…and with my Lord to see the great Wardrobe, where Mr. Townsend brought us to the governor of some poor children in tawny clothes; who had been maintained there these eleven years, which put my Lord to a stand how to dispose of them, that he may have the house for his use. The children did sing finely, and my Lord did bid me give them five pieces in gold at his going away.”

Not that it made much of a difference to the parentless children of London, as the Wardrobe was burnt to the ground six years later in the Great Fire of 1666. Afterwards the Wardrobe was relocated to Buckingham Street off the Strand, and then to Great Queen Street in Covent Garden. The Wardrobe’s functions were eventually subsumed into those of the Treasury in 1782.

Today, the Royal Wardrobe’s history lives on in the names of Wardrobe Terrace and Wardrobe Place; the houses between two and five Wardrobe Place were constructed in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, not long after the Great Fire, and a nineteenth century ghost sign can be seen at the southern end for ‘Snashall and Son, Printers, Stationers and Account Book Manufacturers'. There is also a reference in the name of the nearby St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe Church – although that particular wardrobe is probably feeling a bit unhinged, given that it’s right next door to the Church of Scientology’s London headquarters.

For more stories about the fascinating history of London, have a look at my other articles, or scroll down and fill in the form below to subscribe to weekly updates!