King's Cross, London: the Great Dust-Heap, next to Battle Bridge and the Smallpox Hospital. Watercolour painting by E. H. Dixon, 1837.

1837

1 painting : watercolour ; image 17.8 x 27 cm

View of the Great Dust Heap, Battle Bridge, King's Cross, from Maiden Lane (present York Road); removed in 1848 to assist in rebuilding the City of Moscow, Russia; The Great Northern Railway Terminus on this spot; trees on the grounds of the Small-Pox Hospital in the background, 1837. The lettering transcribed in this record is taken from a sale catalogue entry, Puttick & Simpson, 1909, pasted on the mount Lettering in the painting (lower left) reads: "The dustheap / Battle Bridge / King's Cross."

Signed with initials and dated lower right corner

'Highbury, Upper Holloway and King's Cross', Old and new London: Walter Thornbury, 1878, vol. 2, pp. 273-279 ("Early in the century the great dust-heaps of London (where now stand Argyle, Liverpool, and Manchester Streets) were some of the disgraces of London; and when the present Caledonian Road was fields, near Battle Bridge were heaped hillocks of horse-bones. The Battle Bridge dustmen and cinder-sifters were the pariahs of the metropolis.The mountains of cinders and filth were the débris of years, and were the haunts of innumerable pigs.The Russians, says the late Mr. Pinks, in his excellent "History of Clerkenwell," bought all these ash-heaps, to help to rebuild Moscow after the French invasion. The cinder-ground was eventually sold, in 1826, to the Pandemonium Company for £15,000, who walled in the whole and built the Royal Clarence Theatre at the corner of Liverpool Street. Somewhere near this Golgotha was a piece of waste ground, where half the brewers of the metropolis shot their grains and hop-husks. It became a great resort for young acrobats and clowns, (especially on Sunday mornings), who could here tumble and throw "flip-flaps" to their hearts' content, without fear of fracture or sprain.")

The Great Dust-Heap features in Charles Dickens, Our mutual friend, 1865

M. Hunter and R. Thorne, Change at King's Cross from 1800 to the present, London, 1990

Survey of London, XXIV, King's Cross neighbourhood, 1952, pl. 75 [text p.71]

Wellcome Collection 38709i