¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

There are few better way of getting to know a city than a quiet walk
through the streets. If you find yourself in the West End with a spare half
hour, you should be within a few minutes’ walk of a least one of the areas
the tour covers. The whole walk will take the best part of a morning to
complete.

The tour begins in Regent’s Park (see map p 16). Overlooking the southeast
corner of the park is the 1960s block that houses the Royal College of Physicians
at 11 St Andrew’s Place. In the college garden is a bust of Thomas Linacre,
who founded the institution in 1520, and nearby a blue plaque noting that
the ‘medical naturalist’ Frank Buckland lived in a house on the site during
the 1860s and 1870s.

Buckland qualified in medicine, but his chief interest in nature was
to eat it. He considered everything to be eatable until proved otherwise.
He claimed to have eaten his way right through the animal kingdom and objected
only to earwigs, describing them as being unappetisingly bitter.

He was a keen fly fisherman and he gave up his medical practice to write
columns on fishing for magazines. In 1867 he became the government’s Inspector
of Salmon Fisheries.

The medical connection continues as you leave the park and cross Marylebone
Road. The smart, white, stuccoed Park Crescent was once the home of Joseph
Lister, who lived at number 12. Lister graduated from University College
London (UCL), but then spent more than a quarter of a century in Scotland.
There he began disinfecting operating theatres with carbolic acid, which
vastly reduced mortality after surgery. He moved into Park Crescent after
returning to London in 1877, he introduced the same standards of hygiene
in the capital.

WHEATSTONE BRIDGE

A slightly earlier resident of Park Crescent, was the physicist Charles
Wheatstone, who lived at number 18 during the 1860s and early 1870s. Wheatstone
was a prolific inventor, especially of telegraphic apparatus, and of various
musical instruments, including the concertina. His name is immortalised,
however, in the Wheatstone bridge, a circuit used to measure electrical
resistance, but which he did not devise and to which he made no claim.

A ten-minute walk eastwards, takes you through Fitzroy Square to Gower
Street, where you will see the limestone buildings of UCL. The college stands
on the site where, in 1808, Richard Trevithick built a circular track on
which ran the world’s first passenger-carrying steam train.

Past the main gates of the college, on the wall of the biological sciences
building a plaque marks the site of the house Darwin lived in around 1840.
A century later, Darwin’s intellectual legacy was flourishing at UCL, when
from 1933 until 1957 J. B. S. Haldane held first the chair of genetics,
and later that of biochemistry.

Through his popular writing, Haldane became one of Britain’s best-known
scientists. During the Second World War he worked on the stresses suffered
by sailors in damaged submarines. This vital war work now seems all the
more remarkable because Haldane was a committed member of the Communist
Party, and chairman of the editorial board of the party’s newspaper, the
Daily Worker.

Turning left out of Gower Street at the southern end of UCL, and beyond
the end of Malet Street is a row of Georgian houses, the remains of what
was once Torrington Square where William Wollaston lived. Wollaston discovered
palladium in 1803 and rhodium the year after.

PICASSO PARTY

John Bernal, professor of physics at Birkbeck College, which backs onto
Torrington Square, had a flat at number 22 from 1946 into the 1960s. Bernal
was the model for Constantine in C. P. Snow’s novel The Search, and in real
life was responsible for the first X-ray diffraction pictures from protein
crystals. This line of study has produced many Nobel prizes including those
awarded to two of Bernal’s research students, Dorothy Hodgkin and Max Perutz.

A common interest in the communist peace movement brought Pablo Picasso
to one of Bernal’s parties in 1950. Picasso decorated one of the walls of
the flat with a picture of an angel and a devil, and it remained there until
the 1960s, when the flat – along with the bulk of Torrington Square – was
demolished to make way for new university buildings. The mural is now at
the Institute of Contemporary Arts in The Mall.

From the remains of the square walk south down Malet Street and return
to Gower Street. The house on the corner of Montague Place was occupied
by Henry Cavendish in the latter part of the 18th century. A member of one
of the richest families in England, Cavendish made the first reliable measurement
of Newton’s constant of gravitation.

But for all his scientific achievements, Cavendish was a morbidly shy
recluse and an extreme misogynist. He ordered his meals by leaving notes
for his butler outside his study. He avoided women and forbade his female
servants ever to appear in his presence.

Soho is the next area of interest, a short walk from Gower Street.
In Frith Street, you pass the house (number 22) where John Logie Baird first
demonstrated television in 1925. Make your way westwards, and beyond the
Berwick Street market, is Broadwick Street, where there are memories of
John Snow, the father of epidemiology.

Snow halted a cholera epidemic in 1854 by taking the handle off the
local water pump, so preventing people from drinking infected water. A replica
pump marks Snow’s insight, and on the walls of the upstairs bar of the ‘John
Snow’ pub – if you need an excuse to stop and have a glass of beer – there
is a good account of Snow’s work. A pink kerbstone outside the pub marks
the site of the original pump.

The streets behind the ‘John Snow’ lead to Great Windmill Street where
William Hunter had Europe’s foremost anatomy school. The building is next
door to the Windmill Theatre, which has also drawn those with an interest
(albeit a far from scientific one) in certain aspects of human anatomy.

HUNTER BROTHERS

His brother, John Hunter, the founder of scientific surgery, later opened
his own school in Leicester Square. In 1783 he sat by the deathbed of Charlie
O’Brien, the 7 foot 7 inch circus freak known as the Irish Giant, waiting
for the chance of buying the body – which he did, for Pounds sterling 500.
It was among the 17 000 specimens that Hunter left on his death, in 1793,
and which founded Hunterian Museum’s collection at the Royal College of
Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

Leicester Square has a bust of Isaac Newton. From 1710 to 1727 Newton
lived just off the square, in St Martin’s Street, where the public library
now stands. Just along Orange Street, the National Portrait Gallery has
a large number of portraits of scientists, Newton among them. Newton is
buried in Westminster Abbey, at the other end of Whitehall, with fifty other
eminent scientists.

Returning along Orange Street you come to Haymarket and then, to Waterloo
Place where there is a statue of Florence Nightingale. From there, a zigzag
path takes you north to Piccadilly, Albermarle Street and the Royal Institution.
In April 1846, Wheatstone was due to give a lecture at the Royal Institution.
Waiting outside the auditorium for the clock to strike his nerve failed
and he bolted down stairs and out into the street. Ever since, lecturers
have been guarded by a porter in the minutes before they are due to appear.

In Wheatstone’s sudden absence Michael Faraday had to improvise a lecture.
As a youngster Faraday lived for eight years from 1804 at 48 Blandford Street,
in the area north of Oxford Street. In Spanish Place, off Manchester Square,
is the spot where Faraday later recalled he had spent time playing marbles.

A newsagent and bookseller called George Riebau owned the house and
Faraday became Riebau’s apprentice bookbinder. He acquired an interest in
science by reading the books he had to bind. The chance gift of tickets
to Humphry Davy’s Royal Institution lectures made Faraday determined to
make a life in science. He presented Davy with the notes he had made of
the lectures, neatly written and bound by himself, and this persuaded Davy
to offer Faraday a post at the Royal Institution. You can still see Faraday’s
room there.

Welbeck Street was the home of two eminent physicians. The Georgian
house at number 48 contained the surgery where Thomas Young, best known
for Young’s Modulus, practised for the first quarter of the 19th century.
Next door but one to Young’s house, at number 50, is the house where Patrick
Manson lived. He proved that the organism responsible for elephantiasis
was carried by a species of mosquito. He suggested that malaria was transmitted
by similar means, a theory later proved by Ronald Ross, who lived nearby
at 18 Cavendish Square. Ross received the Nobel prize for medicine in 1902,
but Manson did not.

A few blocks west is Upper Berkeley Street where Elizabeth Garrett Anderson,
the first woman to qualify as a doctor in England lived, first at number
20 and later at number 4, where the Portman Hotel now stands. She had to
spend six months in the operating theatre of the Middlesex Hospital to show
she was ‘tough enough’ to deal with the sights, sounds and smells of mid-19th
century surgery. And that sober thought brings you to the end of the tour.

Dennis and Sylvia Rosen are the authors of London Science – Museums
Libraries and Places of Scientific, Technological and Medical Interest which
will be published by Prion in April, price Pounds sterling 14.99.