Cock Lane

In the junction between Snow Hill and Cock Lane, a road where the brothels were legal, we can find a terracota’s shopfront dedicated to John J. Royle. 

Born in Manchester in 1850, in the late Victorian epoch, this engineer became famous because of his many inventions: the egg beater, the timed egg boiler, the smokeless fuel irons... but it was the self-pouring teapot (patent no. 6327 of 1886) for which “J.J” became most well known.

In 1762, in the No. 20 of Cock Lane, a fraud was perpetrated.

Through a series of tappings and knockings a young girl, named Elizabeth Parsons, said that she could make contact with the dead. “The Cock Lane Ghost” was the spirit of another young woman, Fanny from Norfolk. This lady had an affair with her brother-in-law, Kent, after her sister died during childbirth. 

The lovers moved to Cock Lane, in London, running away from the Canon Law. Their landlord was a parish clerk named Richard Parsons.

Fanny died, years after, from smallpox and Kent moved out the house and took legal action against Parsons because of the debts. The landlord said that he, and his daughter, heard and saw strange knocking sounds and ghostly apparitions in the property. Apparently, Fanny's Ghost said to Elizabeth that his lover, Kent, poisoned her with arsenic. 

In the junction of Cock Lane and Giltspur Street is the figure of the “Golden Boy of Pye Corner”.

This small statue was originally established into the wall of the Fortune of War, a public house in Smithfield. This tavern was famous because of its tenant, Thomas Andrews, who, in 1761, was condemned of sodomy and sentenced to death. The King George III exculpated him. This decision stimulated the first debate about homosexuality in England. In the 19th century, the tavern was the main centre for the resurrectionists. The doctors at St Bartholomew´s Hospital used to go to The Fortune of War to find death bodies to practice their surgeries. The bar was torn down in 1910. 

Meanwhile, Monument, which was enclosed by Monument Street and Fish Street Hill, was built between 1671 and 1677 to commemorate the start of the Great Fire of London, The Boy remembers where the Fire was extinguished. In the sculpture we can read:

The Fire started in a bakery at Pudding Lane and finished in Pye Corner. The child is fat to enforce the moral suggesting that another great fire would happen any day soon.