Birdcage Walk and Bleeding Heart Lane - how London's intriguing streets got their names
They are streets many of us have heard of and perhaps walk down each day. But have you ever wondered how Birdcage Walk and Bleeding Heart Lane they got their names?
When you find out you may never look at them in the same way again.
National Geographic has produced the London Book of Lists revealing the stories behind our historic streets.
You may want to avoid some of them altogether when you find out what used to go on there. One street was used as a public toilet.
Running along the southern length of St. James’s Park, Birdcage Walk marks the former site of the Royal Aviary, built by James I in the early 17th century to house the royal hunting falcons and hawks.
For 200 years, only members of the royal family and the Hereditary Grand Falconer were allowed to ride alongside the Aviary in carriages. Until 1828,all others had to walk (hence the name).
Legend has it that the body of Lady Elizabeth Hatton, brutally murderedin 1626, was found in Farringdon—her heart, torn from her body, wasstill beating nearby.
Skeptics who frown on this urban legend claim the street was actually named after an old pub located there.
Pall Mall’s name is derived from the popular game of the same name that was imported from France and Italy in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The game, in which a mallet was used to hit a ball through a hoop hanging above ground, was commonly played there. Today Pall Mall serves as the address of choice for London’s most celebrated and exclusive gentlemen’s clubs.
Belying its charming sounding name, “pudding” was actually the medieval term for animal guts, and Pudding Lane was a riverside street that housed many a butcher shop.
Animal innards were tossed out the overhanging windows; gravity, time, andthe occasional broom would funnel the “pudding” down the sharply pitched street to the flowing waste removal system known as the Thames. But Pudding Lane is most notorious as the site where the Great Fire of London started in 1666.
Running south of King William Street in the City, Sherborne Lane was formerly known as Shiteburne Lane: The street was a longtime public toilet.
The story goes that Rotten Row, the milelong (1.6 km) bridle path running along the southern edge of Hyde Park, derives its name from “Route du Roi,” French for the King’s Road, as this was the path William III built totravel to and from Kensington Palace.
Debate prevails on the truth of this oft-repeated explanation... but let’s justgo with it.
Houndsditch, at the east end of London, was the medieval final resting place for the city’s deceased dogs and the rubbish disposed with them. Ironically, Jeremy Bentham—philosopher, legal and social reformer, and champion of animal rights—was born on the street in 1748.
Mount Pleasant was the tongue-in-cheek name for the medieval dumpingground of household refuse, ashes, and other trash, along the banks of the woefully polluted Fleet River in Clerkenwell (before the river was buried underground)
The street name remains, though the irony is lost.
In Westminster, a walkway named Cockpit Steps, running south of Birdcage Walk, marks the former site of royal cockfights. For much of London’s history, cockfighting (and betting on cockfighting) was a popular pastime among the upper classes.
The old Royal Cockpit was built in the 1700s. While this structure no longer exists, the steps remain, reminding travelers or better or worse of theold sport.
This Hampstead lane was the location of several taverns that sold flasks of water from a medicinal spring nearby to London’s eating houses and others in the rapidly expanding 17th and 18th century city.