Hockley in the Hole

Pat Rogers, University of South Florida
April 2025

Located a short distance from Clerkenwell Green to the south-east, at the northern end of Saffron Hill, this was one of the main sites of popular entertainment for Londoners in the seventeenth eighteenth centuries. It occupied a low-lying area on the banks of the Fleet Ditch, as the river made its murky way from what is in modern terms the vicinity of King’s Cross towards Clerkenwell Road. The name covered a street forming an almost right-angle bend that joined the northern end of Saffron Hill to Rag Street and Coppice Row (vulgarly Codpiece Row), on their way to the open ground of Cold Bath Fields and a marshy stretch of the Fleet known as Black Mary’s Hole, probably from a Protestant travesty of Blessed Mary’s Well.

Hockley in the Hole first came to notice as a centre for some of the rougher varieties of public amusement. Its role is described by W.B. Boulton: it was “a kind of theatre or arena of the old type which originated in Elizabethan times, and provided accommodation for bull and bear baiting, dog-fights, and contests for prizes between gladiators armed with the sword or with cudgels or quarterstaffs, and such like entertainments.” This remained its prime activity as a physical space for the first half of the eighteenth century. Here, the brutal sports of the age had one of their prime sites, with cruelty doled out in differing measures to wild animals, trained dogs, and even people. Once a mad ass was baited. Initially, human combats chiefly involved swordplay, but from about the 1720s boxing became the most popular show for an eager public. The participants included some of the best-known male prizefighters, but also a surprising number of female pugilists. Several of these performers were also engaged at the more respectable establishment of James Figg on the Oxford Road, where there was no bear-baiting or dog-fighting.

Unfortunately Hockley was as famous for the louche behaviour of those attending the events as for what went on in the amphitheater. To cite Boulton once more, “It derived its name from a word meaning ‘a muddy field,’ and in no way belied the appellation. There was an atmosphere of blackguardism about the place and its entertainments from the first; there were, for example, rumours of dark passages to the banks of the Fleet for the convenience of gentry who attended its diversions and had particular reasons for avoiding constables and Bow Street officers.” That seems a bit snooty, for there is no real evidence for this urban legend. For some, possibly transparent, reasons it is the case that butchers and boxers shared  a taste for bloody diversions. Ned Ward gives an account of proceedings that suggests liveliness sometimes overflowed into disorder among the spectators: “Great Preparations at the Bear Garden all Morning, for the noble Tryal of Skill that is to be play’d in the Afternoon. Seats fill’d and crowded by Two. Drums beat, Dogs yelp, Butchers and ‘Foot soldiers clatter their Sticks; At last the two heroes, in their fine borrow'd Holland Shirts, mount the Stage about Three; Cut large Collops out of one another, to divert the Mob and Make Work for the Surgeons: Smoking, Swearing, Drinking, Thrusting, Justling, Elbowing, Sweating, Kicking, Cuffing all the while the Company stays.”

It is not surprising if people looked down on Hockley. The arena was surrounded by criminal rookeries to the south, where thieves and prostitutes could live in relative security. Its near neighbours included what Peter Linebaugh calls “the walled and forbidding buildings designed for coercion and incarceration: the Quaker workhouse, Clerkenwell workhouse, Bridewell, New Prison, the madhouse and the charity school,” mostly foisted on the local citizens in recent times. (Actually, by 1740 there were two workhouses in the immediate vicinity, one serving St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and the other St. George’s). Linebaugh pictures the gentry passing by these institutions designed to keep the poor in subjection, as they headed for the adjacent pleasure domes decreed for their use, that is Sadler’s Wells, Bagnigge Wells, the London Spa and Merlin’s Cave. It is fair to add that quite humble folk were admitted to these attractions, and that establishments such as charity schools performed a function beyond class regulation.

In the early decades of the century, newspaper ads regularly announced forthcoming events. In addition, street theatre was enlisted to promote the fare on offer. This practice induced the Grand Jury of Middlesex to issue an official complaint at the turn of the century, concerning the “impudence” of the managers, who distributed their handbills to the sound of drums, and in defiance of the king's trumpeter, who had the monopoly of street music at this time. A sad event in 1709 may have affected the reputation of the place though it is unlikely to have deterred all punters from showing up. This was when the proprietor John Preston was attacked by one of his bears, and “almost devoured before his friends were aware of his danger.” A sermon was preached upon the sad event in the neighbouring church of St. James’s by the rector, Rev. Dr. Deuel Pead, a strong supporter of the Hanoverian regime and a prolific sermonizer. The general doings at Hockley, as Boulton drily notes, were “calculated to furnish texts for many sermons.” Preston’s widow carried on the business for several more years.

Not much is known about the economics of the bear garden or its clientele. Along with local bruisers, there was evidently a core of more affluent visitors. Some of them perhaps were smart people from the more fashionable quarters of London, anticipating the “flash” community who followed sporting events in a slightly later generation. The claim that the venue was patronised by “Dukes, Lords, Knights, Squires, &c.,” with special seating for persons of quality, has some plausibility, but exaggerates the general tone of the audience. When the diarist and poet John Byrom visited Figg’s Academy in 1725, it cost him half a crown for admission (12.5 p.). This would be a little stiff for the common people, but perhaps it earned him one of the best seats in the house. Probably Hockley had a lower scale of charges.

Gradually the flow of advertising dropped away. Building developments in the area forced the amphitheatre to shift its operations to Spitalfields in the mid 1750s. Hockley was renamed Ray Street in 1774, most likely in the pious hope that this would distract attention from the unsavoury reputation that the place had acquired. However, most of the district was demolished and built over in the Victorian era. We can get some clue to what the area must have been like from a passage in Oliver Twist (1838), where the Artful Dodger first meets the boy Oliver, newly arrived in London, and conducts him from Islington to Fagin’s den under cover of darkness: “They crossed from the Angel into St. John’s Road; struck down the small street which terminates at Sadler’s Wells Theatre; through Exmouth Street and Coppice Row; down the little court by the side of the workhouse; across the classic ground which once bore the name of Hockley-in-the-Hole; thence into Little Saffron Hill; and so into Saffron Hill the Great: along which the Dodger scudded at a rapid pace, directing Oliver to follow close at his heels.” The character of the district is summed up in a description of Saffron Hill by John Strype (1720) as “narrow and mean, full of Butchers and Tripe Dressers, because the Ditch runs at the back of their Slaughter houses, and carries away the filth.” The phrase “classic ground” contains finely tuned Dickensian irony.

Hockley in the Hole turns up regularly in literature of the period, from Ben Jonson onwards. It is mentioned in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras; Richard Steele’s Tatler; John Gay’s Trivia and Beggar’s Opera (where Mrs. Peachum advises the milksop Filch to visit the Bear Garden to learn the manly art of self defence); and Alexander Pope’s Dunciad, where it is associated with the déclassé art of the poet laureate, Colley Cibber.

The most interesting manipulation of the topos came in 1739, when Henry Fielding adopted the persona of “Capt. Hercules Vinegar, of Hockley in the Hole” in the masthead of his new journal, The Champion. This draws on a pseudonymous “Capt. Vinegar” who appears in advertisements from 1731 as a promoter of contests at Hockley. In the words of W.B. Coley, this publicity represents him as “presiding over a ‘Company’ which performed in a diversionary, perhaps even choreographic way, before the ‘Masters’ mounted [the stage].” Their leader could thus be seen as “a kind of English hero or champion.” In fact they seemed to have been a team who played a warm-up act involving mock-battles with clubs. It is likely that the name was chosen from a contemporary slang sense of “vinegar” as “the Fellow who makes a Ring, and keeps Order among Wrestlers, Cudgel-Players, &c.” (New Canting Dictionary, 1725). Vinegar was thus a referee, as well as a soldier and combat booster or champion. On one occasion he was alleged to have presented at another boxing venue “a new Tragi-comic-pastoral Farce of one Act, call’d, Flesh no Fence against a Flail.”

In June 1741 a pro-government newspaper, the Daily Gazetteer, revived his name in a story that claimed physical retribution against The Champion (which was now written by James Ralph): “Last Week there was a great Boxing-Match at his Majesty’s Bear-garden at Hockley in the Hole, at which the Author of the Champion being present, Capt. Vinegar, after the Battle was over, ordered him to be toss’d in a Blanket, for the Diversion of the Company, for presuming to prefix his Name to such a Heap of Scurrility, Impudence and Nonsense.” Fielding had added the forename “Hercules” to increase the overtones of strength and heroism, and no doubt remembered that the hero traditionally carried a knotted club or clava similar to the quarterstaffs used at Hockley, so that he bore the epithet claviger. The headpiece of the journal shows Hercules cudgeling the Hydra against a background of the city of London. Beyond this, the title of his paper, as Colley suggests, may have been meant to depict the author as a champion of the nation politically. In a curious way, Hockley in the Hole thus briefly becomes the home of an aggressive campaign against perceived enemies of the public good, hydra-like monsters who need to be clubbed into submission by a virtuous pugilist.

The site today is occupied by a portion of drab inner London suburbia. A pub called the Coach and Horses traditionally marks the spot, at the junction of Ray Street and Back Street. There was certainly a tavern by that name from 1819, and more specifically in eighteenth-century maps a small court called White Bear Coach Yard. Today few would regret the passing of the legalised torture of hapless creatures that went on in the Bear Garden, but it is a shame that no sign remains in this charmless corner of the city to celebrate the more innocent pleasures that were cultivated here.

 

Bare-fisted boxing match at Hockley in the Hole, with a bear and an ox being led in from the right preceded by Apollo playing a fiddle. From “The stage medley representing the polite tast [sic] of the Town & the matchless merits of Poet G[ay]” (1728), Lewis Walpole Library 728.04.00.01+. Public domain.