Luke's London

I am in the process of adding a page to my website called "Luke's London" to show how the city would have looked in the time period of The Tudor Enigma series
.

This blog is a sneak preview and I decided to concentrate on just a couple of the photographs that will be on the web page.

London Bridge: Many people confuse this with Tower Bridge, but in Tudor times, the latter did not exist. London Bridge was the only bridge over the river until Kingston Bridge almost 15 miles upstream 
and not far from Hampton Court Palace.

Some of the buildings on the bridge were 7 storeys in height and included shops and houses. As more buildings were added, the bridge supports had to be strengthened and broadened. One effect was that the waters passing through the arches was very turbulent and made "shooting the bridge" very hazardous. It was not unusual for people to disembark at one side of the bridge and get back on the boat at the other.  At the same time, the strengthening of the starlings slowed the water flow under the bridge, something that helped the river to freeze. Henry VIII is known to have travelled downriver by sleigh on the frozen Thames and Elizabeth I also played "shooting at marks"- a form of archery - on the ice.

Tyburn Tree: Close to what is now the site of the monument called Marble Arch, is the location of the infamous Tyburn gallows. There is a plaque set into the ground at the actual site. Here felons were hanged, or if they were low-born traitors, hanged, drawn and quartered. A hanging brought out huge crowds . Houses close to the site would rent out rooms with windows overlooking the gallows. If the felon met a "good" end, he was praised.
In the case of traitors, the hangman might be paid to allow the felon to hang until he was dead before cutting him down and disembowelling him.

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Bringing history to life: the Outer Green of Hampton Court Palace

I write crime fantasy set in an alternate Tudor universe. Those of you who have read this blog before will know how Luke Ballard came into being but I needed a location and believable society in which to put my unassuming apothecary.

Hampton Court Palace is the most complete Tudor palace in England and, although I hate to admit it, that is in part due to William III who sliced through the Tudor building and adding what developed into the Georgian part. I am sure that, left as it was, it is likely the whole building would have been
destroyed by the Victorians. They were big on "improvements".

Once I became hooked by the Tudors in general and Anne Boleyn in particular, it was one of my main aims in life to visit the palace in which she and Henry VIII spent some of their happiest times. For me, Hampton Court has always been Anne's palace. Little wonder that the instant I stepped inside it, I felt I had come home.

For anyone who wants to know how the Tudor privy apartments were arranged, I can only recommend Simon Thurley's enormous book Hampton Court. Over the past years, it has become my bible for all things relating to this wonderful palace.

The Outer Green today is mainly lawn, but it also houses the ticket office and one of the palace shops as well as maintenance buildings. In Tudor times, it was a village outside the inner palace but inside the outer walls. Here were the Houses of Offices Without The Base Court and included a Great Bakehouse, a Privy Bakehouse a Poultry Office with its own Scalding House, a Knife House and a Woodyard. Just outside the main gate - now the Trophy Gate - was a Timber Yard occupying the space to what is now the approach to Hampton Court Bridge.

Henry made many improvements to Cardinal Wolsey's original palace, including building new apartments and offices. Bricks for these works were made on-site and at any one time there would be 250 workmen from all over the south of England working on the buildings.

Can you imagine the stink from the brick kilns mixing with the stench of the scalding house and the smell from the woodyard. The noise of these activities would also mix with the shouts of the young bloods practising in the Tiltyard. This area is now occupied by the Tiltyard restaurant and the palace car park. A perfect place for my apothecary to have his shop.

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Court of Conspiracy is available here:

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