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William Cecil.
    When she subsequently visited here, she graciously allowed him to sit, rather than stand, in her presence as he wassuffering from gout at the time.
‘My lord,’ she is reputed to have told her Lord Treasurer, ‘we make use of you not for the badness of your legs, but for the goodness of your head.’
    The house was badly damaged in a fire and was rebuilt in 1627. After the Great Fire of 1666, it hosted the Admiralty Court, the Prerogative Court and Court of Arches until the Doctors Commons
could be repaired. Exeter House was demolished once and for all in the 1670s, with Exeter Change built in its place. This was intended to be a thriving marketplace, with space for a variety of
small shops, but it never took off. It was rented as office space until it was taken over by Edward Cross, who housed his famous menagerie here from 1773 prior to its move to Surrey Gardens.
    Byron famously compared Cross’s hippos to the then Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool. Another of the most popular exhibits was a five-ton elephant called Chunee, who one day ran amok and had
to be killed by its keeper with a harpoon after several failed attempts to halt the animal with gunfire and canon. Nine butchers flayed the animal – a job that took twelve hours –
before ten surgeons dissected the body in front of an audience of medical students.
    The menagerie was closed and the Change demolished in 1829, to be re-built between 1829 to 1831 as Exeter Hall. It was used by the Ragged School Union, the Sacred Harmonic Society, the
Temperance Society and the Bible Society, and even received a visit from Prince Albert for a series of lectures conducted by the anti-slavery movement. It was ultimately taken over by the YMCA but
was knocked down in 1907 and replaced by the Strand Palace Hotel.

Farringdon Market

    O PENED ON 20 N OVEMBER 1829 TO REPLACE Fleet Market – which had been closed after the widening of
    Farringdon Road – Farringdon Market traded fruit and vegetables and was designed to serve a middle-class clientele.
    However, built at a cost of nearly a quarter of a million pounds, it quickly failed to live up to its owners’ aspirations. In his 1878 work London Old and New ,
Thornbury reported:
    Its produce, however, is very humble, and rarely rises above the rank of the modest onion, the plebeian cabbage, the barely respectable cauliflower, the homely apple, and other unpretending
fruits and vegetables. Pineapples and hot-house grapes are unknown to its dingy sheds.
    The market became the resort of the poorest-of-the-poor traders, with receipts from the Common Councilshowing an average annual income from the hire of stalls of just
£225.
    Henry Mayhew, who visited one cold, November morning, recalled:
    As the morning twilight drew on, the paved court was crowded with customers. The sheds and shops at the end of the market grew every moment more distinct, and a railway van, laden with
carrots, came rumbling into the yard. The pigeons, too, began to fly into the sheds, or walk about the paving-stones, and the gas-man came round with his ladder to turn out the lamps. Then every
one was pushing about, the children crying as their naked feet were trodden upon, and the women hurrying off with their baskets or shawls filled with cresses, and the bunch of rushes in their
hands. In one corner of the market, busily tying up their bunches, were three or four girls, seated on the stones, with their legs curled up under them, and the ground near them was green with the
leaves they had thrown away. A saleswoman, seeing me looking at the group, said, ‘Ah, you should come here of a summer’s morning, and then you’d see ’em, sitting tying up,
young and old, upwards of a hundred poor things, as thick as crows in a ploughed field.
    However, Farringdon Market was the place to go for watercress, with upwards of twenty tons sold each week. Hundreds of retailers – men, women, girls and boys – would arrive here at
3am every