[Music] pip pip tally ho jules guides here in which i wander around london and tell you fascinating facts and today we're in saint giles and it's called saint giles after the leper colony that was founded here in 1117 by queen matilda and saint giles is the patron saint of lepers cripples and outcasts thank you very much thank you very popular with cab drivers um so um this road that we're on here actually st giles high street this is an old roman road and it's quite unusual for a roman road because most roman roads are very straight but it's kind of the continuation of oxford street really but because that area over there was all marshland they uh the romans just said i'll look sod that let's just like take the road around and down there but anyway so loads of different roads me and you know sometimes you see old milestones like there's one in highgate at the top of highgate west hill i think just outside wittenhurst and it says something like five miles to st giles circus a lot of places were measured from here like milestones and stuff anyway back in 1417 sir john old castle who was a friend of king henry v he's the one who inspired shakespeare's character full staff anyway he was guilty of heresy and he was burnt alive here and he cursed the king and he cursed the executioner but he also cursed the land that he was executed on so it's not surprising really that in later years this has had a reputation for some pretty bad luck i mean this area over here used to be a warren of run-down slums known as the rookery because of the people packed in like roosting birds and john keats described it as a place where misery clings to misery for little warmth and wants and disease lie down side by side and grown together filth infested the air but eventually that gall got knocked down in order to build new oxford street over there this is actually matilda apartments named after queen matilda you know who founded the colony but these are these are designed i think by lorenzo piano the guy did the shark [Music] and in the 60s they built this eyesore over here which is the center point tower further evidence of the bad luck of this area is it's now really overcast i filmed the other day when it was beautiful and sunny so i can cut to some nice sunny shots now i heard that center point was built as a kind of bunker during the cold war to look after civil servants in case of a nuclear attack or something but uh because of advances in weaponry and stuff it kind of rendered it obsolete wasn't there a snooker hall underneath it yes yes it was i think that must have been part of the the bunker yeah um i never played in that snooker hall but it was uh but anyway in the end it just remained empty for decades anyway that's what some bloke told me down the pub so what's nice is that if you watch my music tour of soho i go down uh denmark street here and i talk all about the music they were doing loads of work then there was a scaffolding up and now they've taken it down you can see all the beautiful old 17th century houses that were built i think it's possibly the only street in london where you've got these 17th century houses on both sides of the street in fact i mean it's named after the prince of denmark uh who was married to queen anne if you care but what i find interesting about it is this but this place here this used to be a job center i remember when it was a job said then back in the 1980s was it um dennis nielsen the famous serial killer he used to work here and they had a christmas party and he prepared the the christmas meal and he used a pot from his house that he had used for boiling his victims heads i mean i know it's really gross but yeah look the church over here saint giles in the fields now it's called saint giles in the fields to distinguish it from saint giles in the city because this was all like just in the marshes this is based on the last judgment by michelangelo i think it's part of the sistine chapel but the original one is is inside the church you can actually see let's go and have a look at the the original ones this is just a stone replica but they've got the original one from what 1687 or something it's made out of wood beautiful actually carved inside there pretty well preserved for 1687. that's not that far after the actual painting was made doesn't i mean well this fella he's actually buried out in the churchyard there but they've rescued his tombstone around the back so what i wanted to show you was inside the church there um they've got the tombstone which was originally out here this is where the plague pits were so the plague started instant giles um and many people who died in the plague were buried here in this churchyard um along with people who were executed at the kind of gallows that was here for a while but also inside the church i was trying to show you was the tombstone of richard penderell richard pendrell was the guy who helped king charles ii after the battle of worcester and he he he helped him hide an oak tree um so there's a pub called the pen draw oak actually he's named after richard pendrell and one of these tombs i don't know which one it is there he is in fact it is this one this is the grave of richard pendrell so we've got him to thank for the restoration i suppose and having theaters again and restoring the monarchy i suppose i mean had it not been for him king charles ii would have been killed and maybe they wouldn't have brought back theaters like he did take notice of this sign they rebuilt this pub this has been here definitely since the 18th century but then they rebuilt it in victorian times you can see an old sign for a french garage up there i love those old signs open day and night apparently but anyway this is one of the pubs that offered what they called the saint giles bowl when you were being transported so they stopped after that i think they stopped doing the executions here they moved them up to thai burn gallows which is where marble arches today and when you were being transferred from newgate prison on a wagon they'd take you all the way up here which is this old roman road that i was talking about they'd take you all the way up oxford street down to be executed but what they'd do is they'd stop at one of these pubs and buy you one last merciful pint of ale one of my favorite characters jack shepherd he took the saint giles bowl here now jack shepherd was a notorious 18th century thief and prison escapee he actually escaped four times before they finally caught up with him and uh and then he was to be executed and they brought him along here he took the saint giles bowl but he only drank half of it he said give the rest to jonathan wilde who was this thief taker general the duplicitous weasel who who dobbed him in actually jack shepard was very much loved and all these daring feats of escape really got into the public consciousness they all thought he was a real hero the king even commissioned a portrait of him so everyone knew what he looked like he was easily found and daniel defoe wrote his autobiography for him and they sold it on the day of his execution as he came down here so anyway lovely problems so after you've taken this last merciful drink they'd um they'd so sometimes they'd say oh do you want another drink and then have to say to them well no he can't have another drink he's on the wagon so that's where the expression comes from to say he's on the wagon meaning i've given up drink so you've got to get back on the wagon your feet wouldn't touch the ground again you're going to be hanged at tyburn that lamps off the wagon the land the street lamp looks like it's just coming out of the pub completely wasted this is yes the drunk drunk street lamp you've got an obsession with [Music] [Applause] what does it say out there elms elms leicester's that's painting rooms and stores yeah this so that's what this door is for they painted uh scenery for the for the west end theatre so that's why i've got such a massive door there probably been transferred into offices now like a lot of other things i mean this side i think this used to be cross and blackwell pickle factory yeah yeah and they provided work a lot of people used to work in this area worked here in the pickle factory he was a homeless guy who lived around here i think he was very well liked it's only once you get to a certain age you start trying to crack that joke poor old bill posters what did he ever do my dad always used to say that thinking it was hilarious and now i've started doing it now that i'm a certain age i didn't try crying with laughter now in 1929 william and gilbert foyle moved their bookshop well it wasn't actually here because they actually moved it to that building behind there that's when i was young it was it was over there where that pink building is then in the 1930s one of their daughters called christina she actually ended up sending a telegram to hitler because he was burning books though that famous book burning exercise and she she wrote a a a cable to him saying for you she wrote some mr hitler stop please stop burning books stop i'll give you a good price stop please please please stop so i can't help quoting blackadder if loving blackadder is wrong i don't want to be right gustapping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them so yeah now that foils now is has moved to here and this actually used to be the saint martin school of art as you will see in my soho music tour where the sex pistols played their first gig accompanied by bazooka joe with um adamant on the base i think he played do you remember when foyles was there and it was really difficult to find a book because they were the very old fashioner they tried to categorize everything by publisher instead of by by author so you wanted a book you have to go all over the place they really need experts in there and after a while they started employing these people who had very classical names so you'd have someone called hector working there or someone called achilles on one occasion someone went in there and they were they were looking for a book by james joyce and they said i'm trying to find ulysses and they said oh no he's gone out to lunch she came from greece she had a thirst for knowledge she studied at ritz and martin's college that's where i caught her right that's what he's talking about in the pulp song she studied art at some point she studied there where foils has now moved to now look just opposite there is the phoenix theater look at this beautiful isn't it so you see those two those four columns all twisted this is a typical style of sir giles gilbert scott who designed the telephone box and uh the batsy power station and all that stuff obviously loads of famous people have uh performed there but uh what i really like is next thought at the phoenix artist cup have you ever been in here son oh this is i think you know i used to be a member here and it used to be the case that you had to be an actor to go in and you kind of still are supposed to be and i always used to manage to blag my way in anyway it's an excellent place to go for a drink after hours i used to come in here back in the day it's terrific let's see who's around there's colin over there hello sir hello busy doing my accounts how boring is it oh what the life of a of a an artiste how are you i'm okay oh terrific i used to be a member here well you're still a member if you have a theater ticket if you've been to the cinema or if you've been a member before you can come in whenever you like we give out memberships to all of the people in the west end front of house backstage cinema workers whatever yeah can anyone come in or yes so we have a very weird license here the license is that um anyone that's been to a show or bought a ticket to the west end can come in as a one-day member or we come in before nine o'clock it's membership after nine o'clock but we're not very strict to tell the truth if you work in the west end or you've done a show we've been out filming we're more than happy i have mixed them in the past [Music] years ago 1930 the phoenix theater this was the rehearsal room so you had laurence olivier do private lives here rehearse um in 1988 it turned to the phoenix artists club um most people in the industry know this as shots because it never sharp because it used to be called shuttleworth so like the ian mcallens or anyone that's been in the west end says you know i'm going down shots what's happened to me is that during the lockdown i've forgotten all my kind of cool places to go we're a bit of a hidden gem not many people know about us so it's really nice that you've come in but if you come down here we've got like shows every night we've got signed posters we've had all sorts of stars like yourself [Music] got all the casts of you know things like um frozen come down and les mis comes down tonight is open mike and a lot of the guys that were in shows sing there and a lot of our guys from open mic go on to sing in the west end a bit of a late night drinking joy the famous thing about the phoenix is if you can remember getting out of the place you haven't had a good enough night [Music] thanks colin see you later see you later thanks for dropping by no problem i've never eaten there but that must be a very good ramen bar because it's always got a massive line of japanese people queuing up to get in so i always figure that must be a good sign likewise just over the road there this is a shattery avenue we're coming up to now and they've got the first punjabi restaurant in london but i saw some indian people eating in there so i always figure that must be a good sign you know if it's just full of brits then you know you're not kind of so sure now sometime in the late 1600s the street became famous for its lace and finely embroidered coats but before long it did deteriorate and in the end you just had all these people occupying these basements and stuff and outside all these houses and shops you'd have boots and shoes which people would bring them and they'd repair them charles dickens describes these people who worked in these underground kind of places there's like tronglodites or something coming up to breathe like otters for air and what i like is this this place here the um freud's this gives a good idea of actually what what it was like they they they had these kind of really deep basements like this and they'd sort of poke their heads up and all there'd be shoes all along here like this and people would come along and buy them like the morlocks in there the time machine by h. g wells you know those underground people simon they live underground so anyway it's quite a good bar i go to freud's it's got it's like a cocktail bar this is a this is the shop for anybody who's into science fiction and comics and toys forbidden planet forbidden planet used to be on new oxford street didn't it yes i wouldn't be at all surprised if some of the action figures in there were sculpted by simon have you sculpted any other things in there well maybe sort of thing simon does it's quite sad that arthur beale saw one of the oldest shops in the whole area it's been i was there since for about 500 years but because of the rising rents and everything the west end there's not so much need for them but they started about 500 years ago selling sail cloth and ropes and stuff like that on my instagram i think just before they closed down a few months ago i went in there because they were just having a closing down sale there was a flaxsen plants used to grow around this area claxton was used for making the ropes for ships london was such a major important port back in the old days and everything tensing norgay and eric shipton bought their ropes from here before their first ascent of mount everest and a lot of the western theaters also got their ropes and things here for you know pulleys and stuff that you need for raising the curtains and things like that it's a bit they always find it pretty sad when they close things down but now uh now they've gone online you can still buy some nice stuff i'm gonna i'm gonna get myself a nice like you know one of those nautical jumpers [Music] yes look the odeon here this was originally in 1931.
this was a theater called saviles and actually it wasn't it was only called saviles because the bloke who designed it didn't want to name it after himself so he randomly picked a name from the telephone directory came up with saviles i suppose uh if he could go back in time it'd probably change the name you wouldn't want your theater to be connected with someone of that name these days but anyway what do you call that freeze fresca for this freeze it won an award by a guy called gilbert bay so that sort of depicts drama through the ages so we've got i see it goes from the modern age right down to the yeah greeks there gladiators imperial rome the beatles manager brian epstein he used to be the manager here oh yeah at one point yeah and then they used to use it as a pop venue during that time but then he uh he died in 1960 when he killed himself in 1966 and it passed into the hands of his brother actually he's very young so was it was it a fear to stroke cinema like they they were all built that way back in the day yeah i think it was a theater originally but it only became a cinema in 1970. now let's go around the back they're very simple aren't they because obviously you've just got a big screen in there but you have small offices you have tiny little windows they've never changed the window frames they're all still the old 20s frames the whatever you know from from early in the 20th century just beautiful i love it we're just on the end of earlham street and shaftery avenue and uh it's one of the few places left in london where you can actually buy records and things and there's not many you just have hmv and virgin mega store and stuff anyway you see this place on the corner here that that was in in the john le carre novels you know like tinker taylor soldier spy and stuff like that that's where the hq is the headquarters of the aspiring the espion they conduct espionage throughout great britain it's just above there and um do you remember didn't they used to also be the limelight was it the limelight or the slime light and there was in that church next to it that was the walkabout i loved the walkabout you could really go and get completely wasted and it wouldn't matter it was like a complete shameless drinking i used to love it it was such a great venue i don't know why they all closed down it's such a pity this is uh they widened the street used to be called whole glam that's back ages ago but i think to improve access to chiang cross station probably they wide and charing cross road this is the originally it was just the road that led up from whitehall all the way up to hampstead or the lane really i watched roberto baggio miss his penalty in the uh world cup final upstairs in the cambridge i used to go there quite a lot oh showing my age but just opposite there look here at mcdonald's actually 84 charing cross crossroad just after the war a writer from america called helen hemp was trying to order books from this bookseller and frank dole who was the main buyer for this shop here he was very helpful to this lady from america who couldn't get english books and so every time she wrote he would go and pack up some books and write back and she'd send food parcels over for the people working in the shop and they got very friendly after a while um i think there was a hint of romance but they never actually met in person anyway it was very sad because around like 1968 she the letters stopped she stopped getting letters from him and she wondered what had happened it turns out he had actually died but no one told her and so she came over here around 1971 to come and find out what happened she stood outside the shop and it was it was still standing but all the shells were empty and it closed down and she stood here all sad and it was it took her a while to find out what had happened to him um but then obviously after that she went on and wrote this book 84 charing cross road now it's a mcdonald's some people think because this used to be there used to be a road here called little compton street and some people think that it was under the ground here because through this great you can see it says little compton street down there but it's not true it's just it's just an old utility it's a utility tunnel it's just for kind of electricity and sort of cables and stuff like that but it does show that it's it's served a street which is no longer here called little compton street i like that look at that bar salsa i used to go there for salsa lessons it's really good fun i used to love it are you joking seriously you used to seriously you're serious you used to do i'm not saying this you know i just i don't know if you're joking or not what do you mean i'm sooner or later when i get a million subscribers i should say david please remember to subscribe to the channel try to get me on strictly come dancing i'm sure i'm going to get on well i've got a million subscribers that's robert shaw's son is it robert shortly sure isn't that incredible that's remarkable he looks just like him he looks exactly like robert shaw as well the guy from jaws you got city hands hooper been counting money all your life back at the end of the 19th century there was a fellow called charles booth who was a social reformer and uh he made a map of all the streets in london and so it was kind of a poverty map and it said said what each street was like and everything and this one he said that it was a street full of burglars pickpockets pimps and prostitutes and now it's got well the ivy which is the famous restaurant where lots of celebrities always come and eat you know back in the day when i was uh hanging out with my celebrity friend woody harrelson he had been in a show in the west end with kyle mclaughlin the guy from sex in the city was he i think he was in texas city we were backstage or something and and and we said oh we're going to this pub with woody are you coming and he said no no i'm going through the iv i think he might have been a bit more of a lovey than woody anyway it was woody harrelson who suggested to me he has seen my films by the way and it was him who suggested to me that i should be more funny hey jules he's hey jules man you're a really funny guy you should should be more funny though in your films it was right at the start when i started doing them you know there's a thing or two about being successful yeah and being funny as well so uh so i said yeah all right so i've tried to be funny so that's uh i don't know if i've succeeded but uh look opposite there's the mouse trap the agatha christie look swing it around simon this is the this is the longest running play in the whole of london been there since 1952 can you believe and i've still never seen have you seen it i still haven't seen it and i have to see it at some point why don't we go and see it come on let's do it now you you sort of match oh what do you mean i match you do you think this is the sort of place that would match a person of my stature should live in a place like this they are on the nice aren't they i think it's this one i can't remember i i came here many years ago this used to be bungees where many famous pop stars performed down in the basement it's a tiny little folk seller bob dylan definitely performed there david bowie cat stevens rob stewart just in a tiny little basement paul simon oh wow it's all changed it's all changed it's nice stage used to be over there and of course let's not forget little lost lou whose music you can buy on the jules guides website but just just next to there is one of if not my favorite wine bar in london la beaujolais which i visited in vintage jewels [Music] what would be your favorite temple everybody drinks everything in here especially what i recommend so what about the bottle of chardonnay from corsica magnificent this young lady of yours what would my wife did you come here often yes we do actually yeah yeah when we have our little meet-ups this is where we come because it's a nice little hidden hidden place it's a secret this place yeah people can walk right past it the whole time and never see it and that's the beauty of it yes a little bit more civilized a little bit yeah it's civilized yeah better better atmosphere that's the beauty of london it's got its secrets that means if you drink to forget pay before you start to forget happy new year happy new year no swearing it's been here for like years 50 years fifth year you're not the proprietor i am not i am not i'm far too young to beautiful players the thing about the beaujolais is you never know who you'll make your meat the phantom of the offer you'll meet a high court judge the wine is amazing the eggs are superb the eggs it's i like the fact that they sell eggs that's right you say the pascal i think that must that must be the parish of saint giles in the fields presumably i mean that's that's what it's indicating anyway um sfg saint giles in the fields and uh now what are we gonna do i guess we can go back up that way and uh find a par about the other end of sharksbury avenue so amazing this street actually they did use the grow vines down here look how gorgeous everything is here look at the buildings and it's barely used hardly anybody walking down here driving down here what it's just now if you want a really good idea of what shops would have looked like back in victorian times this one's been here since 1857.
