One of the main pitches used by Italian beggar boy Carlo Ferrari (who gives my book its title) was at the southern end of Regent Street. Seventeen years after the Italian Boy case, architect John Nash’s colonnaded walkways in Regent Street were removed, after objections from shopkeepers that they encouraged loiterers, beggars, pimps, thieves and prostitutes and were putting off legitimate shop-window-browsers. It was all a far cry from Paris’s glorious covered-shopping indoor streets, the Arcades, it was felt.

The decision to remove the Regent Street colonnades, at the southern “Quadrant” part of the street, was criticised in the Times and the Daily News. (Second picture from top, the operation gets under way. Here’s what the Times thought of the decision:
“The destruction is complete. One of the most striking features of modern London has been cut off its face, and a great public injury committed, to gratify a score of persons who fancy they will be individually benefited by the removal of the colonnade. Now that the mischief is done, some of our contemporaries are raising their voices against it. The Daily News says, ‘The poor Quadrant! Has no one a kind word to say for it before it goes? Shall we part from it without a friendly word – a sad, or at least a respectful, farewell? There are many among us old enough to remember what the space, now covered by the Quadrant, was before the Prince Regent and the Prince of Architects invaded it. The narrow streets, the wretched hovels, the dens of infamy (we may almost say) that stood upon its site – who did not rejoice in their destruction?

” ‘There sprang up in that place the finest street in Europe, and the largest colonnade. A diversity of opinion may exist as to the merits of the work in detail, but there can be none as to its effect as a whole. The Quadrant has been one of the features of London: not a foreigner but asked for it; not a print shop abroad but would display in its window an engraving of it, good, bad or indifferent, under the attractive though over-comprehensive title of “La Ville de Londres”.’ ”

The Times continued, “We repeat it, there was one spot in London through which, without intending it, one was continually passing, and it has been laid waste through the mercenary cupidity of a set of barbarians, who from this moment forth are doomed to the destruction in which they have involved the pleasant colonnade under the shade of which they were not worthy to dwell. These Sampsons of cigars and ribands have uprooted the pillars of the Quadrant from the solid earth, but it is upon their own heads the first destruction will fall. May their ribands fade! May their papier mâché teatrays crack! May their cigars be transformed in the night into cabbage leaves, if, indeed, they may not be so already; and may every crack, flaw, and evil quality of their soiled and spurious wares stand revealed before their customers under the full sunshine which they have dared to invite into their winows and shop fronts.”

The Era newspaper, of 3 December 1848, could not agree less, however, and took the Times to task for snobbishness: “Now it is just possible that the writer of the above is a Regent Street lounger, and his indignation is sincere; but knowing, as we do, that the Times can affect all that kind of thing. . . we have no doubt but that the article in question is a morsel of pure and wanton spite. . .[The Quadrant’s] disadvantages were great, and it was wise to remove the entire protruding mass. How is it that the houses in Regent Street were more respectable, and commanded higher rents, than the houses in the Quadrant? Shopkeepers in the latter quarter complained that their shop frontage was a lounge for the idle and the depraved, a harbour for common theives and well-dressed swindlers. The ceiling overhead was constantly dripping, and out of repair, and the pillars themselves seemed to attract to the obscure shades they cast upon the doorways, keepers of hell and houses of ill fame.

“There was a gloomy and suspicious character about the place, and now its whole face is brightened up by light and air. The gambler and the pickpocket and the prostitute will find the place less congenial and the metropolis has cause to rejoice in the fact.

“There are admirable covered ways in Paris, but how unlke what the colonnade of Regent Street was! The latter was no protection from the cold blast, and but little from the pelting storm; the former are light, airy, warm, brilliant, agreeable promenades, and not the harbours for the sly skulker and the bold profligate. Regent Street is now what it ought to be, in spite of the Times.”

The image at the very top of the page shows the final stages of the construction of Regent Street, over two hundred years ago, in 1813. The County Fire Office, on the right of the picture, was where Carlo Ferrari would stand, asking for pennies for displaying his cage of white mice. The image below is sketched from Piccadilly, looking up Air Street, to the colonnades of the Quadrant, in 1840.

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