Chapter Two
Charing Cross
A Queen’s Last Journey and the Cross That Disappeared
Why is Charing Cross called Charing Cross?
In brief: Charing was already an old place-name, probably referring to a bend or turning. Cross recalls the memorial erected at the final London stopping place of Eleanor of Castile’s funeral procession; the popular chère reine explanation is not supported by the evidence.
Transport context: London Underground and National Rail station.
On 28 November 1290, at Harby near Lincoln, Eleanor of Castile dies.
The household knows before the kingdom does. Doors close. Servants speak quietly. Clerks begin to write the words that turn a woman into an event.
Edward I has been married to her for thirty-six years. History will remember him as Longshanks: tall, severe, a lawgiver, conqueror of Wales, enemy of the Scots. None of these names is useful beside a deathbed.
Afterwards he writes of the wife whom he cherished in life and cannot cease to love in death.1
Kings may grieve, but royal grief requires administration.
Eleanor’s body is embalmed at Lincoln. Her internal organs are buried in the cathedral. Her heart is sent to the Dominican church at Blackfriars. Her body must travel south to Westminster Abbey.2
So begins the journey that will give a station its name.
The cortege moves slowly through winter. At each principal stopping place the coffin rests. Priests pray. Bells sound. Towns receive the dead queen and release her again in the morning. Grantham, Stamford, Geddington, Northampton, Stony Stratford, Woburn, Dunstable, St Albans, Waltham: the road becomes a sequence of vigils.3
Edward decides that the resting places will be marked.
Twelve crosses are commissioned. They are not the small timber forms of a roadside devotion. They are tall Gothic monuments of carved stone, carrying images of Eleanor and the heraldry of kingship. They ask for prayer, but they also announce power. Grief is made architectural.
Only three will survive substantially: Geddington, Hardingstone and Waltham Cross.4 The last of the twelve is intended for the final halt before Westminster.
The place is already called Charing.
Its name is older than Eleanor and probably comes from the Old English cierring, a bend or turning, perhaps describing the curve of the Thames nearby.5 Later generations will improve the story. They will say Charing comes from chère reine, dear queen. It is beautiful French and bad history.
The queen did not give Charing its first name.
She gave it its second.
On 16 December the procession reaches the small settlement between the City and Westminster. Eleanor’s coffin rests there for the night. The next day it continues to Westminster Abbey.
Then the masons arrive.
Richard of Crundale directs the work. Stone is cut, measured and raised. Alexander of Abingdon supplies figures of the queen. Between 1291 and 1293 the final memorial takes shape near the top of what is now Whitehall.6
It is the last cross on the road and perhaps the grandest. Travellers approaching the royal centre see it above the market activity and houses. The monument fixes memory to a junction already important in London’s movement.
People say they will meet at the cross at Charing.
Then at Charing Cross.
A name is born from convenience.
The monument stands for more than three centuries. Rain wears it. Governments change around it. The Reformation makes its religious imagery suspect. Civil war makes royal monuments dangerous.
In 1647 Parliament orders it destroyed.7
The workmen come with ropes and tools. Statues descend. Carved stone breaks. The monument that was meant to hold memory is reduced to material that can be hauled away.
Edward’s cross is gone.
The Lawyers Who Lost Their Way
The demolition produces a joke.
A satirical ballad imagines the lawyers of the nearby Inns of Court discovering that, without Charing Cross, they may no longer know how to find their way home. The verse is political mockery, but its joke depends upon something practical: the cross is not merely a royal memorial. It is a piece of London’s navigation.8
Modern addresses encourage us to think that a city locates itself by numbered doors and named streets. Seventeenth-century London relies more heavily upon visible objects. A tavern sign, a church, a conduit, a gate or a cross can organise the instructions by which people move. Turn at the monument. Wait beneath the sign. Take the road beyond the church.
Destroying such an object creates a brief problem. Directions continue to point towards something that is no longer there.
The problem solves itself in an unexpected way. Londoners do not abandon the direction. They preserve it. Coachmen still call the junction Charing Cross. Maps retain the words. People arrange to meet at the absent monument because everyone understands where the absent monument is.
The ballad’s lawyers do not remain lost for long.
The cross becomes more durable once it no longer has stone to weather.
After the Restoration another king occupies the site. An equestrian statue of Charles I is erected there in 1674–75.9
The irony is exact. Parliament destroys a medieval royal memorial; the restored monarchy places the image of an executed king on the same ground. One dead sovereign replaces another, though Eleanor’s name remains attached to the place.
The statue of Charles I marks the original location more accurately than the cross most visitors now photograph.
That cross comes later.
In the nineteenth century the railway presses towards the West End. Hungerford Market is cleared. Tracks cross the Thames. On 11 January 1864 Charing Cross station opens.10
The company does not need to invent a name. It takes the one London has preserved for six centuries.
Then it builds a cross.
Edward Middleton Barry designs the monument outside the station hotel. Thomas Earp’s firm carves it. Completed in 1864–65, it is a Victorian interpretation of an Eleanor Cross, richly Gothic and confidently medieval in appearance.11
It is not the original.
It does not stand on the original site.
It exists because the station has already borrowed the name of the monument that was destroyed.
Yet replicas, once old enough, acquire their own authority. Generations pass beneath it. The imitation becomes part of the history it imitates.
The station roof suffers a more sudden fate. In 1905 an iron tie rod fails and a section of the great train shed collapses. Six people are killed.12 The engineering confidence of the Victorian age lies broken across the platforms.
Below ground, confusion multiplies.
The Baker Street and Waterloo Railway opens Trafalgar Square station in 1906. A separate station, later called Strand, opens on what becomes the Northern line in 1907.13 They are neighbours without being one station.
Only in 1979, during the construction of the Jubilee line, are the separate parts joined and given the single name Charing Cross.14
For twenty years Jubilee line trains terminate there. Then the extension to Westminster, Waterloo and Canary Wharf follows another alignment. In 1999 the Jubilee platforms close to passengers.14
They remain underground.
Film crews use them. Hidden London tours enter them. Tiles, signs and passageways wait in artificial light, a modern ruin beneath one of the busiest parts of the city.15
Above ground is the memory of a cross that vanished in 1647. Below ground is the memory of a line that left in 1999. Charing Cross contains two absences, one medieval and one modern.
The station itself offers the best clue. Along the Northern line platforms, David Gentleman’s murals show medieval craftsmen constructing the Eleanor Cross.16 Stone is shaped, hauled and raised. The work proceeds panel by panel while passengers walk past.
The dead queen is not shown as sentiment. She is shown as labour.
This is fitting. Monuments begin in royal command but are made by hands. The king grieves; the masons measure. The name survives because thousands of ordinary people continue to speak it.
Leave the station and stand before the Victorian cross. Study the figures of Eleanor and the heraldic shields. Then walk towards Trafalgar Square and look south, to the equestrian statue of Charles I at the head of Whitehall.
There stood the original cross.
From that point Eleanor’s coffin travelled the final distance to Westminster Abbey. Her gilded effigy still lies there. Her heart went elsewhere, to Blackfriars.
The city joins the chapters again.
Listen to the announcement: Charing Cross.
Inside the words are a winter death, a funeral road, twelve stone monuments, Parliament’s hammers, a Victorian railway, a persuasive imitation and abandoned platforms under London.
The queen is gone.
The first cross is gone.
The village is gone.
The name remains.
Notes and Sources
Westminster Abbey, “On the trail of love: the Eleanor Crosses”.↩
Westminster Abbey, “Edward I and Eleanor of Castile”.↩
Westminster Abbey, “On the trail of love: the Eleanor Crosses”.↩
English Heritage, “The Eleanor Crosses: A Journey Set in Stone”.↩
Westminster Abbey, “On the trail of love: the Eleanor Crosses”.↩
Survey of London, “The statue of Charles I and site of the Charing Cross”, British History Online.↩
English Heritage, “King Charles I (1600–49)”.↩
Edward Walford, “Charing Cross, the railway stations, and Old Hungerford Market”, Old and New London, vol. 3, British History Online. Walford reproduces verses associated with the 1647 demolition that joke about nearby lawyers losing their familiar landmark; the anecdote is used here for what it reveals about the cross as an everyday point of orientation.↩
Historic England, “Statue of Charles I”, National Heritage List for England entry 1357291.↩
Network Rail, “The history of Charing Cross station”.↩
Historic England, “Queen Eleanor Memorial Cross”, National Heritage List for England entry 1236708.↩
Network Rail, “The history of Charing Cross station”.↩
Transport for London Corporate Archives, A Brief History of the Bakerloo Line, and London Transport Museum collection records for Trafalgar Square and Strand stations.↩
Transport for London Corporate Archives, A Brief History of the Jubilee Line.↩ ↩
London Transport Museum, “Charing Cross: behind the Silver Screen”.↩
Westminster Abbey, “On the trail of love: the Eleanor Crosses”.↩