After my recent post about my ancestor John Wait (1797-1868), several people have asked me about a place he lived in during the 1840s called Three Cup Alley in Shoreditch. It was difficult to find; the area has changed considerably down the centuries, but some of it does still survive.
The alley first appears in John Rocque's map of London in 1746. The north-south stretch was once known as George Street, while the grimmer east-west length was known as Three Cup Alley.
The alley's name has a quaint charm, but in reality, it was far from being a pleasantly old-fashioned place. James Elmes in, “A Topographical Dictionary of London” (1831), gives us a graphic description of it:
“The place alluded to is Three-Cup-Alley, Shoreditch, where shame to magistracy, and those in power, it excels in nastiness, its entrance is dark as Erebus, and the polluted smell that issues from the nauseous filth … The posterior parts of their dwelling. Are they not bestrewed with blood, offal and contaminated matter, from which an effluvium arises that darts through all the avenues of the brain and makes the inhabitants wretched indeed.”
Most buildings around Three Cup Alley were demolished during the construction of Great Eastern Street in 1877 - probably for the best. All that survives today of Three Cup Alley, is a small section to the right of what used to be called George Street and now Fairchild Place. Today it is an extremely narrow, litter strewn dead-end, lined with air conditioning units. Hard to beleve that John, with his wife Jane and their eight children, eked out an existance somewhere along this squalid alley over 180 years ago.
The alley seems to have been named after The Three Cups Inn, once located at the southwest intersection of Bread Street and Watling Street, about a mile from the alley. The earliest surviving reference to The Three Cups is in a will dated 10th August 1363. For over 500 years, The Three Cups provided food, drink and shelter for guests and their horses. It was re-built several times and in 1720 was described as, 'large and well built and of great trade for country wagons and carriers.'
Being located near a "prison house pertaining to the sheriffes of London," during the Sixteenth Century, records suggest it was a probably a meeting place for thief-takers.
