Water Gate of York House, prior to 1882

From: William Strudwick

RA Collection: Art

"No.69 - The Water Gate of York House

It is hardly necessary to say that the Gate at the bottom of Buckingham Street, Strand, which is now far enough away from the Thames, was, as is implied by its other more usual name, York Stairs, one of the numerous landing places which were thronged with watermen in the days when small boats plied for hire, and offered a much-used way of getting from place to place. The reader will recollect Addison's charming account of Sir Roger de Coverly's trip with his one-legged waterman from the Temple Stairs to Spring Gardens, when the worthy knight encountered the "Thames ribaldry", an established form of "chaff" in which Dr. Johnson, as Boswell tells us, once took high honours.

The Water Gate is all that remains of the Palace of the Dukes of Buckingham, which extended from the Strand to the river. The name York House descended to the Palace from a former house on the site, bought about 1557 by Heath, Archbishop of York, who left it to his successors. (Stow, p.153.) It was afterwards the residence of the Lord's Keeper of the Great Seal, and here the great Bacon resided. Sometimes as Aubrey tells us, as he strolled in the garden he bargained pleasantly with the fishermen throwing their nets in the river below. In 1624, an Act was passed by which York House came, by exchange for other lands, into the possession of James I., who bestowed it upon George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham.

Peter Cunningham, in his handbook says that the Duke "pulled down the house and erected a large and temporary structure in its place......" Nothing, however was permanently built but the Water Gate. In his Life of Inigo Jones he says, "The Water Gate may be looked upon as only a portion of a great building......the assassins knife restricted York House to an installment only (a water gate)." These two accounts are inconsistent, and are probably both wrong. In Wilkinson's Londina Illustra is an engraving made from Holland's drawing of York House in the Pepysian Library at Cambridge. The date assigned to the drawing by Wilkinson, "about 1630," is manifestly incorrect, as Hollar came to England in the train of the Earl of Arundel towards the end of 1636 only, and his first English view is dated 1637. (Vertue, Description of the Works of Wenceslaus Hollar, pp. 138,139.) But the view no doubt shows York House as it existed not long after the Duke's assassination in 1628. It represents a great quadrangular building in the classical style, but having on the east side, "the rear of the existing Water Gate, three square battlemented towers, which must have been of an earlier date. It is clear that more than "an installment" was built, and there does not appear to be any reason to suppose that the building was temporary. Bassompierre, who paid a visit to the Duke at York House in October, 1626, speaks of it being "extrêmement beau," a term scarcely applicable to a temporary structure. The statement in Strype's Stow (Ed.1754, II., 651), that the Duke added much to the old building, is probably near enough to the truth. The Duke appears to have used York House as an official or state residence, and to have generally lived in Wallingford House, close by. (Bassompierre, Memoirs, Croker's translation, notes on pp.24, 25, and 70.) Here his son the second Duke was born, in January, 1627.

This second Duke of Buckingham sold the house in 1672 to a party of building speculators, who pulled it down and erected on the site, George Street, Villiers Street, Duke Street, Of Alley, and Buckingham Street, thus preserving to the minute particle the name and title of the former owner. These new streets were collectively know as York Buildings. They had their own water works, the supply of water being raised from the Thames by means of horses. The tapering wooden water-tower, octagonal in plan, is a conspicous object in old views of this part of the Thames. In the house (shown on the right of the photograph) at the bottom of Buckingham Street, on the east side, marked by one of the too-few tablets of the Society of Arts, lived Peter the Great, and in the house opposite to this, since largely rebuilt dwelt Pepys.

The earliest authority on the subject of the Water-Gate is Colin Campbell, who, in the text referring to an elevation, says "This gate was erected for the first Duke of Buckingham when Lord High Admiral of England, Anno 1626, by Inigo Jones" (Vitruvius Britannicus Vol.II. p.28) but it has of late years been claimed for Nicholas Stone (Builder, Vol.xii. 359), on the strength of an entry in an account book (preserved in the Soane Museum) of Charles Stoakes, Stone's nephew. This entry is as follows:- "The Water Gate at Yor House hee desined and built & ye Right-hand Lion hee did fronting ye Thames." On this Mr John Hebb, who has been good enough to furnish me with his notes on the Water-Gate writes: "This evidence in inconclusive. It rests, it should be observed, upon the testimony of Stone's nephew alone, who appears to have a pardonable desire to exaggerate the achievements of his distinguished kinsman. It is not confirmed by Stone, himself, who has left a minute account of most of his works. It is possible that Stoakes used the word 'designed' in a sense different from that which is now attached to it, and that he only meant to represent that his Uncle 'set out' as we should now say, as well as carved, the sculpture of that Gate." Stone, in addition to being a master-mason - he was thus employed on the Banqueting House - executed a vast number of tombs for noblemen and others. He was for instance one, the last-named of three who made, in 1611, the Founder's Tomb," shown in No. 48 of the series of photographs. He even acted as architect, but there is nothing certainly known to be his that makes it at all creditable that he could design so masterly a work as the Water Gate. Moreover it weakens our belief in the claim on behalf of Stone to find that St. Paul's, Covent Garden, has also been claimed for him. (Batty Langley, Ancient Masonry, I.225), though we have the assurance of Webb that the church was designed by Jones - Vindications, &c., p.119.)

Since the making of the embankment the Water Gate has remained in a hollow, so it would not be practicable to get a satisfactory photograph of it. Under the circumstances recourse was had to Mr Strudwick, of West Dulwich, who most obligingly supplied a reduction of his view of the Water Gate, taken by him some years ago - one of the many records he has secured of objects since altered or destroyed."

The above description was written by Alfred Marks and taken from the descriptive letterpress which accompanies the photographs.