We always enjoy Open House Days in London, when buildings that you don’t often get an opportunity to visit throw open their doors.
This year we took the opportunity to see inside some of London’s livery halls.
Back in the Middle Ages tradesmen set up Guilds to regulate their business (and to prevent competition from non-guild members). When some guilds introduced their own distinctive clothing and regalia – or livery – to distinguish their members from those in other guilds, they became known as livery companies. The peak period for the formation of guilds was the 14th century when many received charters from the Crown, enshrining their rights to control trade in their areas.
The most powerful English Livery Companies were those based in London, but their rights extended only within the City. As London grew, with many businesses set up outside the City, and trade became more competitive, the Livery Companies had less power and gradually ceased to become a significant element in the control of business. The companies still exist though and are joined by new companies seeking to improve the public profile of their profession. Nowadays, the Livery Companies are mainly concerned with education and charities, often with links to public schools such as the Merchant Taylors schools (so called because ‘tailors’ is a nasty modern spelling).
The Livery Companies established ‘Halls’ (sometimes originally regular houses) in which to conduct their business. In time, these Livery Halls became very grand, reflecting the importance of the companies. Unfortunately, all were destroyed in the Great Fire of London, with many of their replacements bombed out during the Blitz.
Architects’ Hall
We visited three livery halls during Open House. One was the Architects Hall, which incorporates the Old Temple Bar, which used to mark the boundary between Westminster and the City of London. Designed by Christopher Wren, it was built across Fleet Street between 1669 and 1672. It was always a purely ceremonial barrier (it had no gates, so was always open) and by the end of the 19th century the obstruction to the free flow of traffic was no longer considered acceptable. In 1878 it was removed. It was bought by a successful brewer, Henry Meux, and rebuilt as a garden feature on his estate in Theobolds Park in Hertfordshire.
By 2003 the building was in poor state of repair and it was returned to London, this time to be incorporated into the redevelopment of Paternoster Square by St Paul’s Cathredral. Here it now stands as part of the home of the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects. This means that one of the newest of the Livery Companies has one of the oldest halls.
Temple Bar is a well known and much-photographed building, so I didn’t take my own photo. This picture is taken from Wikipedia.
The offices of the Architects Hall are in the modern building to the right of the photo above, but they incorporate the one small room above the arch. It was never designed as usable space and was, for many years used to store ledgers, until the weight of the paper threatened to collapse the floor. It’s now a meeting room with the interior practically rebuilt and of little historical interest. It’s fun, though, to stand inside and look out through the window over the gateway.
Stationers’ Hall
Most livery companies have modern halls. Many of the old halls were destroyed during the Blitz. One of the oldest is the Stationers Hall which dates back to the building put up after the Great Fire.
The Stock Room was originally used to house stock: notably copies of Old Moore’s Almanack which the Company owned the copyright of and which was a big money-spinner for them. It’s been redesigned since the 17th century and it’s been a while since it’s actually been used to store books or magazines.
This is the actual Hall, the heart of any livery company.
And here is the Court Room, which was added in 1748.
Salters’ Hall
The third Hall we visited was the Salters’ Hall. This is a modern building, designed by Sir Basil Spence, who was responsible for Coventry Cathedral. It’s a striking block, one of the only Livery Halls in the City to have been built in a truly contemporary style. Unfortunately, it’s not particularly photogenic.
Stephen Richards / Salters’ Hall, Fore Street / CC BY-SA 2.0
So today is publication day for Monsters in the Mist.
I’m excited. I hope you are too, but I can understand that you’re probably a lot less excited than me.
Why am I excited about Monsters in the Mist?
Galbraith and Pole are leaving London to solve a murder in mid-Wales. The story is set in a beautiful part of the world where, until a couple of years ago, I used to spend several weeks every year. I miss it horribly and in the story I was able to set off walking across hills I know well.
The Galbraith & Pole books are what they call Urban Fantasy, a genre I hadn’t even heard of when I started writing them. A key point about Urban Fantasy is that the fantastical elements are set in a very real world. Many of the places in Monsters in the Mist are easily identified on the map, but some details are wrong, mainly because I don’t want the places where the villains live to be identifiable locations. There aren’t a lot of people living in mid-Wales and it would be embarrassing to suggest that some of my former neighbours have been out on a killing spree on the hillsides. I hope, though, that I catch some of the things that make mid-Wales special and that you might decide to make a visit.
Not all of the story is set in Wales. Pole spends a day in Porton Down, the all-too-real secret government research establishment in Wiltshire and the story climaxes in an RAF base which is not nearly as fictional as most readers will think it is. Look out for the ‘Works Unit’ sign on the M4 and ask yourself if you think it is really a Works Unit.
If you’ve liked the previous Galbraith & Pole stories, you’ll enjoy learning more about the mysterious Section S and meeting more of the people who work in it. If you haven’t already read Something Wicked and Eat the Poor, you’re missing out, but you should still be able to enjoy this one. It’s got mad scientists and agents of the Deep State, special forces soldiers and helicopters, and, of course, tango.
What’s not to love?Monsters in the Mist is available on Kindle at £3.99 or in paperback for £6.99. Buy it now and read it in time for Halloween.
It’s just a week until the publication of the latest Galbraith & Pole adventure, Monsters in the Mist, with my Undead hero, so please forgive me for another post about vampires.
What do vampires mean to you?
Bela Lugosi as Dracula
The ultimate vampire, of course, is Dracula and the classic book about him is Bram Stoker’s novel. But if you want to write about vampires nowadays, you need to take a long, hard look at the myth. Can vampires really turn themselves into wolves or bats? Do the laws of physics not apply, so they throw no reflections and cannot be photographed? The vampires of the 19th century were truly supernatural beings, but nowadays there is so much that is almost magical about science that it seems better to make our vampires something that can at least partly be explained rationally.
My vampires like to fit in unnoticed around humans. They do, it’s true, avoid daylight – but many people nowadays live much of their lives in the dark With the aid of sunglasses and high factor sunscreen, vampires can get by. Many of them don’t like garlic, but who can blame them? Garlic certainly won’t kill them. Neither will most things, though a stake through the heart really is fatal – but so is a bullet.
My vampires hang out round Brompton Cemetery with its baroque sepulchres. Some even live there, but most prefer the comfort of regular houses. With money carefully invested over centuries, many can afford apartments in the nicer parts of Chelsea.
Brompton Cemetery
The whole ‘drinking blood’ thing can be problematic, but as illegal highs go, blood is quite easy to get hold of and it isn’t as if they don’t enjoy a good meal or a fine Scotch. They enjoy a lot of the finer things in life: if you have hundreds of years to develop your taste, you can become quite a connoisseur.
There are murderous vampires, of course, just as there are murderous humans. Given that the first Galbraith & Pole story, Something Wicked, is a twist on the police procedural genre, there has to be a murderous vampire or there wouldn’t be a story. But there are vampire policemen too, tidying up after the renegades like my vampire hero, Chief Inspector Pole.
If vampires were living among us, you’d think that somebody would have noticed something odd. And people do. But the government colludes with the vampires to cover things up. It’s convenient for governments to be owed favours by immortal beings who have been forced to learn how to move silently and undetected through the night and who can, when necessary, kill before vanishing away without trace.
What would happen if one of these vampires met a down-to-earth human policeman who was less than happy to keep their secret? How does a policeman solve a case when the chief suspect is a creature that no-one can know exists?
Meet Chief Inspector Galbraith and join him on a journey through a London nobody knew existed.
Something Wicked did not set the bestseller lists ablaze, but enough people liked it for me to produce a sequel, Eat the Poor, which has a definite satirical edge as Galbraith and Pole hunt down a werewolf with links to the world of Westminster.
With Monsters in the Mist, Galbraith and Pole have been taken out of their comfort zone as they investigate a killing on the mountains of mid-Wales. Could this be another werewolf or are there even darker forces afoot? It’s story that takes us from an isolated farm to the government research centre at Porton Down and an explosive climax at a secret military base just off the M4. Some of the locations are entirely fictitious, but they’re not the ones you’re thinking of.
Galbraith and Pole explore the world outside the M25 and you may never look at it quite the same way again.
Monsters in the Mist is on pre-order for Kindle (£3.99) at mybook.to/MonstersInTheMist. It’s also available in paperback from Thursday at £6.99.
Monsters in the Mist is the third of my books featuring Galbraith & Pole. It can be read as a stand-alone book, but it builds on the world established in the first two books. It certainly helps to have read the first in the series, Something Wicked.
Something Wicked explains how the vampire, Pole, came to be working with the Metropolitan Police, where he met Chief Inspector Galbraith and they worked together on their first murder investigation. Pole is not your conventional vampire. He lives in an elegant apartment in Chelsea were he enjoys cooking (often with garlic) and fine whisky. But he does avoid daylight and feeds on blood.
For the next five days, Something Wicked will be on offer for just 99p/cents. It’s quite a short book, so it gives you time to read it ahead of the publication of Monsters in the Mist on 27 October.
If you’re not sure about spending 99p, you can get an idea of the story because the opening is available free, read by me here:
“If you enjoy light, amusing and elegant humour and would relish the thrills and chills of the supernatural kind, the Something Wicked is definitely for you.”
“It has everything a good book needs: an engaging plot full of surprises, a critical portrayal of contemporary society, complex characters you identify with, and, most importantly: vampires!”
“A really great read! Who knew a story about vampires, detectives and tango could be so entertaining?!”
Monsters in the Mist is the third book I’ve written featuring Galbraith and Pole. Galbraith is an old-school London detective who finds himself working together with a vampire to solve some distinctly unusual crimes.
The first book in the series, Something Wicked, found them investigating a murder that had left a peer of the realm dead in his study, drained of all his blood. Obviously vampires were involved by why, after hundreds of years of hiding in plain sight, were they revealing themselves now? The investigation takes in a tango hall (vampires are big on tango) and night classes at Birkbeck College (vampires can hardly be expected to study during the day) before an explosive climax in Brompton Cemetery.
In the second book, Eat the Poor, a werewolf is attacking people on council estates across London. Is this a supernatural beast with a political agenda? Galbraith and Pole team up again to track down the killer, who, it seems is close to the heart of government.
In their latest adventure they are called in when a dismembered body is found on a Welsh moor. The urbane Chief Inspector Pole is well out of his comfort zone in rural mid Wales and Galbraith is almost equally uncomfortable so far away from London. Pole is unhappy, too at suggestions that there might be another werewolf on the loose. He is certain that there must be an alternative explanation for the killing but others are not so sure. This time their investigation takes them to a classified government research facility and a dramatic showdown in a secret military base.
The cover is another wonderful effort from Dave Slaney.
The Galbraith & Pole stories are not your conventional vampire tales. For a start Pole is hardly your conventional vampire. An enthusiastic cook (not that he needs to eat solid food), he loves garlic as well as tango. His Chelsea flat is an oasis of calm, where Galbraith finds himself Increasingly at home. It’s fair to say that these books do not take the genre too seriously.
Monsters in the Mist will be available in time for Halloween and can be pre-ordered now. Watch out for it: a police procedural with added bite.
