London Urban Legends by Scott Wood Page A

devil-infested building, Walker & Runtz. They had recently acquired 54-55 Cornhill on behalf of a client, Mr Hugh H. Gardener, and they had found the original building to be ‘somewhat shallow’. On October 1891 they wrote to St Peter’s requesting a lease for 578ft of land where the old vestry building and lavatories stood, into which they could extend 54-55 Cornhill in exchange for £290 per annum. Walker & Runtz suggested that this money could be used to build a new vestry on another part of the site. After considerable discussion, the request was passed to the rector and churchwarden, who were ‘of the opinion that no sufficient reason has been shown to justify them in recommending the scheme for the favourable consideration of the vestry’.
    On 19 April 1892, Walker & Runtz served St Peter’s with a party wall notice. Such a notice is given in a dispute over a boundary wall when it encroaches too far onto someone’s property. The vestry were concerned enough to consider the cost of moving their wall back. So a dispute took place before the current 54-55 Cornhill was constructed; so far so mythical.
    Walker & Runtz applied for the chance to buy 111.5ft of land to the west of the vestry, and this time the proposal was entertained. The money raised from the sale funded a new secure strong room for the church in which to keep their communion plate (before then a warden was taking it home to keep it safe) along with other improvements. After a meeting regarding the sale, the Ecclesiastical Commission made the decision to use the funds for the ‘aid of the living’.
    Pages 110–119 of the minute book have a report on the whole process of the sale, signed off by the rector on 25 October 1895. Once the Ecclesiastical Commission had approved the sale everything went smoothly: the Corporation of London approved it, and after the old building on 54-55 Cornhill had been demolished, the area of land was re-measured and sold. The report states that St Peter’s has benefitted from the sale of ground that was previously used to keep lumber with its new strong room, improved lavatories and cloisters, as well as a fund to aid the living.
    And that, as far as St Peter’s minute book is concerned, is that, until 9 April 1901 when they received £150 for an increase in height of 54-55 Cornhill. There is no further mention of 54-55 Cornhill, and no mention at all of its devilish decorations.
Enter the Ceramicist
    The man who sculpted the demons was William James Neatby (1860–1910). Neatby was an architect who turned to ceramics, creating some amazing tiles and building façades. He is most famed for the tiles entitled The Chase , which depicts various hunting scenes in the meat hall in Harrods, including speared ducks and captured boars. He could also do symbolic images, such as the Spirit of Literature on the front of the Everard Building in Bristol, a former print works. The spirit, in the form of a woman, has Guttenberg and his successor, William Morris, on either side of her. A grotesque dragon hangs from one drainpipe.
    Neatby could also do the bizarre. The Turkey Cafe in Leicester is just that: his signature blending of Art Nouveau and Arts & Crafts-style ceramics with a regal turkey perched at the top, its tail feathers radiating from its rear like sunbeams.
    Neatby is a fascinating and mostly forgotten figure, but he is often praised in architectural journals. In The Studio, J. Burnard enthuses about his ‘vivid imagination a handicraftsmen who has thoroughly mastered the ways and means of his materials’.
    Louise Irvine, writing in the Architectural Review in 1977, declared that ‘many terracotta buildings in London and elsewhere reveal his influence and could even be him but, as yet, the necessary documentary evidence has not yet come to light’.
    Neatby himself comes across as an enigmatic character; passionate but somehow severe. He could not see the point of impressionism and his style is a robust yet sensual